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Falun Gong’s evolving definitions through stages and disputes

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Falun Gong’s evolving definitions through stages and disputes

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University of Southern California

Falun Gong’s Evolving Definitions through Stages and Disputes

A Dissertation

Submitted to the the USC Graduate School
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Communication

By

Mei Zhou

December, 2013

2
Acknowledgements

This dissertation could not be without the support and guidance of my committee
members. Not only did Dr Tom Goodnight graciously take me under his wings, he
introduced me to the movement theory of Leland Griffin. His patience, gentle goading,
and thorough editing and proofreading is both admirable and an education in and of itself.
I benefited a great deal from Dr. Stephen O’Leary’s writings on dramatism and topic
theory. His perspective on New Religious Movements led me to a field of which I had
had little exposure. I also would like to thank Dr. Don Miller who enlightened me to the
concept of embodied religiosity as a useful conceptual tool.

During this arduous journey, my family has always been with me, providing help
morally, emotionally, and financially. To them I am forever indebted. I especially want to
use this opportunity to thank my father who instilled in me the love of reading and the
habit of questioning and thinking. To his memory I dedicate this dissertation.

Last but not least, I would like to extend my heart-felt gratitude to those Falun Gong
practitioners among whom I did my field work. Rarely a day spent among them went by
without my being impressed with their conviction, courage, and endurance. They have
my upmost respect, and will remain a great source of inspiration to me.

3
Contents

Chapter One Proposing to Solve Falun Gong’s Categorical Confusion through
Topoi in Dramatistic Action, 4

Chapter Two The Four Topoi: Setting up the Parameters, 48

Chapter Three Legitimating Qigong through Health and Science, 95

Chapter Four The Appeals of Health, 136

Chapter Five Propaganda Rhetoric: Violated Religio-Political Order and
Domestic Polity, 187

Chapter Six A “Cult” Story: Self-Immolation and the Loss of Agent-Hood,
237

Chapter Seven Conclusion, 285

Notes, 330

Bibliography, 361

4
Chapter One
Proposing to Solve Falun Gong’s Categorical Confusion through Topoi in
Dramatistic Action

Over the past decade, China has assumed an increasingly stronger presence on the
global stage. In 2010, China overtook Japan as the world’s second-largest economy.
Fueled by phenomenal economic successes, China now has the ideational confidence to
redefine capitalism, socialism, authoritarianism and democracy in ways running against
the global norm.
1
Most importantly, with a string of high-profiled global P.R. spectacles
including the 2008 Olympic Games, China is poised to export its “soft power” in addition
to having supposedly led the world out of recession. All things considered, it appears the
century-long project of re-asserting a proud “Chinese-ness” has achieved its goal.

Against this backdrop, issues related to human rights and social justice — issues
traditionally defining Western perception of China — are increasingly marginalized. The
world leaders’ stance has softened in the face of China’s rising status.
2
Correspondingly,
China has stepped up its hawkish attitude, claiming that domestic turmoil, ethnic strife
and human rights violation are merely domestic affairs, and as such only subject to
Chinese jurisdiction. True. The world’s media still pays ritualistic attention to China’s
human rights record at global conferences and UN meetings, which is unfortunately soon
to be obscured even before media fatigue sets in.
5
This dissertation is about a resistance movement, Falun Gong, which, through its
domestic guerilla-like warfare and more significantly its diasporic networks, refuses to be
written off as a human rights footnote. Emerging as a ground-up response to a reform-era
China on fast track to modernity, Falun Gong is indexical of significant socio-political
changes. Its birth, development and subsequent repression highlight China’s political
system and the harsh symbolic environment in which the movement is embedded.

This project will trace the evolution of Falun Gong through several stages as it is
lodged in the dynamics of state vs. society in China’s post-Mao context. Casual observers
of the Falun Gong vs. the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) conflict are perhaps tired of
the polemics which seem to be stalemated. But this is a relatively recent development.
Before this state vs. society confrontation reached a discursive dead end, the Falun Gong
story took place quietly among the rank and file, tolerated and even encouraged by the
Chinese state eager to divert the post-Tiananmen political tension, and remained by and
large off the global media radar.
3
Gradually, this honeymoon-like coexistence gave way
to disputes and contentions until both parties reached a point where compromises seem
nearly impossible.

This project adopts a dramatistic approach to examine how the Falun Gong movement
developed interactively and diachronically as various parties involved in the debate
negotiated their grounds. Doing so accomplishes several objectives: It illustrates the
6
trajectory of a group evolving from being penetrated and embraced by the system to its
total alienation and transmutation into a full-fledged protest movement; it documents
historical shifts and moments of tension and guilt which called for subsequent redress and
rationalization; it draws and expands on the theoretical propositions raised by Kenneth
Burke, Leland Griffin and Robert Cathcart, in seeing language as dramatic “moves” and
“motives” which in turn distinguish the form and rhythm of a movement;
4
it proposes to
“simplify” the controversy by endeavoring to locate a finite number of key terms
organizing narratives and debates; it gives utterance to a movement which, by many
accounts, does not quite look like a movement at certain points.

This chapter begins by painting a brief background of the movement with an eye
toward laying out the apparent contradictions in terms of movement definition. Then, in
an attempt to resolve the aforementioned contradictions, I move on to posit the major
theses, develop a critical perspective, identify research materials, establish chapter
organization and discuss the limitations of my perspective.

A Brief Background

Falun Gong, also known as “Falun Dafa,” was founded in 1992 by Mr. Li Hongzhi in
Changchun, China. Riding on the coattail of Qigong which took China by storm in the
1980s and early 1990s, Falun Gong situates itself as an advanced denomination of
7
Qigong. “Qi,” literally “air,” “gas,” or “breath,” means vital energy or cosmic energy
(“cosmic breath”), which, according to Chinese cosmology and medicinal theory, is the
ontological foundation of being. “Gong” is translatable into “skills” or “moves.” While
Qigong, or the “skills” to tap into, harvest and manipulate the cosmic energy, stresses the
physical and technical aspect of healing, Falun Dafa, by accentuating the “laws and
principles” of “human body techne” (alternatively called “human body science”),
endeavors to present a comprehensive set of philosophies and principles couched in the
demystifying language of “science.” As Li Hongzhi proclaims in the beginning sentence
of his most important book, Zhuan Falun, “The Buddha law is most profound…it is the
most intricate and extraordinary science.”
5
This “science,” or “episteme,” however, has
inherited the traditional oriental cultural assumptions grounded in “a profound
interpenetration of matter and spirit, body and soul.”
6
Emphasizing the “unity of physical
and spiritual healing,” Falun Gong as a semi-religious practice stands “in contrast to the
Western distinction between medicine and religion.”
7

Falun Gong was once a state-sponsored organization. Formally affiliated with the
semi-official China Qigong Research Society, from 1992 to 1996, Li toured China,
Europe, and the US, giving numerous lectures, frequently under the auspice of the China
Qigong Research Society, and at times at the invitation of Chinese embassies overseas. In
this process, Li received recognition and awards from China’s Ministry of Public
Security and officially-organized China Health Expos in Beijing. His books and
8
videotapes were released by state-owned publishing houses as best sellers. From 1992 to
early 1999, Falun Gong primarily spread as a fitness movement by word of mouth; it
attracted something like 70-100 million domestic followers, adding a grand coda to
China’s two decade-long “Qigong fervor.”
8
With Li’s immigration to the US in 1996, the
“center” of the Falun Gong network also moved from China to New York.

The turning point of Falun Gong came on April 25, 1999, when over 10,000 Falun
Gong practitioners had a day-long, peaceful and quiet rally outside Zhongnanhai, the
central leadership compound known to Westerners as “China’s Kremlin.” By Falun Gong
followers’ accounts, the motive of the rally was to protest unfair media treatment and
request official recognition of their group. It is generally agreed that this gathering
triggered an intense state campaign to discredit the group, ban and burn its publications,
and suppress the followers through legal and administrative measures. In cases where
“re-education camp” failed to “transform” the “hardcore” practitioners, stories of
long-term sentencing, jailing, ruthless brainwashing, psychological abuse and physical
torture appeared en masse.
9
More than one decade into the ban, the Chinese state
continues to see Falun Gong as an eyesore, denying at once the claim that over 3000
Falun Gong deaths have occurred as a result of police brutalities.
10
In response to state
oppression, Falun Gong has since transformed from a healing movement to a social
movement of protest. While the domestic followers, by and large underground now,
continue to get their voices heard through posting banners and distributing bootlegged
9
publications, their diasporic counterparts are making the most of available political means
which include organizing parades, doing press conferences, launching lawsuits against
visiting Chinese officials, urging the US Congress to pass bills and resolutions
condemning the persecution, and running their own newspapers and websites. Of
particular notice are Falun Gong’s cyber skills which they have fruitfully deployed to
break through China’s “New (Internet) Berlin Wall” in smuggling in and out banned
information.
11
The kind of commitment, mobility and competence with which the group
mounts its resistance, vis-à-vis the extent and severity of the crack-down, has earned
Falun Gong the following epithets: “the biggest challenge (to the regime) since
Tiananmen” (ex-CCP chief Jiang Zemin), “China’s biggest human rights tragedy”
(Amnesty International), and “China’s most visible conscience movement” (Falun Gong).

Falun Gong’s Categorical Confusion

In studying Falun Gong, my point of departure is from the most obvious and the most
observable. What first intrigues me is the categorical confusion which started when Falun
Gong first burst onto the global mediascape embroiled in China’s anniversary politics and
the global pre-millennial paranoia.

In retrospect, the year 1999 was fraught with tension. Marking the 10
th
anniversary of
the Tiananmen massacre, the 40
th
anniversary of the Tibetan rebellion (which resulted in
10
Dalai Lama’s flight from China), the 50
th
birthday of the People’s Republic and the 70
th

birthday of the Chinese Communist Party, the last year of the second millennium sent the
media, the public and the Chinese state -- already deep in Y2K jitters -- into a heightened
state of alert for sudden eruptions. While media pundits and China watchers were
awaiting the return of China’s political dissidents (successors of China’s Tiananmen era
protestors), out of nowhere, slipping through the already tight, tight security, emerged
over 10,000 obscure individuals engaged in a silent, passive, almost motion-less “show of
force.”
12
With eyes closed, arms raised in meditative posture to soothing music, these
“protestors” – many of whom were current or retired state employees – were very reticent
to quizzical outsiders as regards the purpose of their visiting Zhongnanhai.
Understandably, most bystanders were shocked by this group. Speaking for the global
media ill prepared and hence taken by surprise, South China Morning Post’s Jasper
Becker said, “We don’t really know anything about them. …we’ve simply been caught
with our pants down.”
13

The journalistic confusion was evident in the medley of labels and story frames tossed
out as the Western press scrambled to make sense of the situation. Some Western
reporters adopted the neutral state vs. society framework which put a positive spin on “a
peaceful spiritual movement” with an “apparent absence of ideology” courageously
“demanding for legal status” and “religious rights.”
14
Some, more attuned to the raging
cult-panic in the West, instinctively situated the story in a conspiracy scheme where a
11
“mystic cult confronted the central government,” which, thus challenged, “nabbed
doomsday believers” as “cult unrest grew.”
15
There were still others who stepped outside
the confrontational angle and elected to read Falun Gong as the latest addition to the
global New Age trend.
16
Summarizing the framing chaos, Human Rights Watch Director
Ken Roth remarked that “the American press doesn’t know quite what to call Falun Gong.
It is not a religion. It’s not really just an exercise group. It’s some kind of mystical
combination of things that doesn’t fit into an easy label.”
17
As if echoing his sentiment,
one Reuters reporter, at wit’s end, simply identified Falun Gong as a “mishmash” of all.
18

Indeed, as far as labeling is concerned, the most glaring incongruities seem to stem
from the very players engaged in the drama themselves, illustrating the particularities of
China’s political culture and the distinct local connotations these terms carried. First,
where Western scholars would easily characterize something like Falun Gong as a “folk
religion” or “neo-religion,”
19
“religion” is not a readily available signifier to be applied
to the movement in the Chinese context. In fact, both the movement itself and the state,
as if out of consensus, have either declined or argued against the adequacy of it. All along,
the Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi emphasizes that “Falun Gong is not a religion” for
being free from such trappings as temple, roster, ritual, and clergy – considered burdens
rendering modern religions “impure,” as he claims.
20
The authorities also speak
dismissively about Falun Gong. “It is not a religion,” slighted China’s then-President
Jiang Zemin, but an illegitimate group “not subject to laws and protections applicable to
12
religion.”
21
Paradoxically, in the subsequent denigrating discourses mounted against
Falun Gong, its identity was re-classified by reference to religion’s pejorative subset, i.e.
“superstition,” a term denoting “perverse and blind beliefs,” customarily pitted against
“science” and intensely contested by Falun Gong. Negotiations and disputes surrounding
the meaning of “religion” and “superstition” invite one to question the political economy
and theological substance these two terms refer to. Second, Falun Gong is wary of being
seen as “political,” which is still the case even after its public breakout in the mass rally
at Zhongnanhai. Although in the eyes of the Party-state, the mass rally, speedily
mobilized and well-organized, undoubtedly sealed Falun Gong’s status as a political
challenger, the movement nevertheless contends that the rally was merely -- in its
carefully coined words -- a “spontaneous outburst,” not strictly organized as a protest.

In
fact, a decade after the Zhongnanhai event, Falun Gong still insists that the rally should
be viewed as a “petition” or an “appeal” which expressed faith in and goodwill toward
the leadership. Falun Gong’s anti-political stance was once so ingrained that it went as far
as pronouncing incommensurability between Falun Gong membership and political
forwardness. Drafting an open letter in 1999, a Hong Kong Falun Gong group declared
that “followers disqualify themselves as members if they interfere in a country's political
affairs, break the law or challenge government policy.”
22
For a social movement to have
such entrenched misgivings against political actions and political labeling, comments a
Western observer, “public protest must be a crime in China.”
23
What is also visible from
this paradox is the gap between the already executed political behaviors (mass rally) and
13
the inadequate post-facto political consciousness and self-understanding. Third, for a
period of time, “health” was the consensual designator for the movement both the state
and the movement gravitated toward (until the “health” story fell apart in what was
perceived to be a political turn of the movement). As an umbrella term, “health” not only
unified the Falun Gong experiences (it still does) but also legitimated its institutional
status as a self-help therapeutic movement registered with state-sponsored medicine and
sports entities. In a way, “health” was as much favored as a term as “religion” and
“politics” were avoided. Yet “health” poses a few problems. How is health’s
quintessentially “corporeal” aspect to be reconciled with the spiritual, other-worldly, and
consciousness-oriented emphasis we commonly associate with religion?
24
Put differently,
the particular brand of “health” embraced by Falun Gong needs to integrate “spirituality”
with “physicality” to achieve an embodied religiosity. Moreover, since “health” is
traditionally conceived in relation to private activities and individual pursuit, how are we
to account for the kind of civic actions inspired by “health” initiatives? What is at stake
as regards “health” which could eventually spiral into a full-fledged protest movement?
Fourth, when the dispute occurred, both the state and the movement vied for the
sanctioning vision of “family” and defended their own motives in the name of family
interest. To encompass the conflict, the government claimed to function in the role of a
“chastising parent” scourging “unruly children,” whereas the movement urged the
government to reconsider its parenting philosophy. Later, the government posed as a
“guardian of family” accusing the group – now alienated as “cult” -- of committing
14
“heinous crimes” against “families and children.” The movement, however, conversely
blamed the state of manipulating believers’ loved ones for the sake of intimidation and
persecution. Despite the antagonistic rhetoric, both parties had the domestic order in mind.
It begs the question of how “family” as a term was selectively advanced in organizing
discourses which clashed head-on. To summarize, I have discovered four key terms
around which the Falun Gong controversy unfolds: “health” (What is the significance of
“health” to the movement and its participants?), “politics” (How does “politics” function
as a motivating force and an intimidating power? How are we to understand Falun
Gong’s status as a political challenger unwilling to wear the political label?), “religion”
(How do the symbols of “religion, “cult,” and “superstition” operate in China’s symbolic
environment?), and “family” (Does the Chinese government vs Falun Gong dispute
resemble a family affair? How is “family” deployed in the dispute?) These four rhetorical
constructs constitute the crux of the controversy and carry with them real-life
consequences in determining policy outcomes and the fates of thousands of individuals
involved.

The questions mentioned above function as the springboard of my investigation. It is
my contention that categorical confusions and labeling incongruities concerning Falun
Gong can be usefully resolved with a detailed understanding of the meaning of health,
family, religion, and politics and the manner in which they are discursively mobilized in
service of rhetorical needs. I argue that a closer examination of Falun Gong’s
15
identification trajectory reveals the consistent presence/absence of these symbolic
constructs and topical motifs in the movement’s formative stages. I also argue that
symbols should best be viewed rhetorically. That is to say, they are socially constituted
utterances and rhetorical strategies to accomplish actions and fulfill tasks. How the actors
motivate and arrange symbols highlight the historical and cultural context of the
particular discursive act as well as the motives and competence of the individuals
involved. As Duncan observes, dramatic tension is realized through symbols, because
“the kind of symbols we have, who can use them, when, where, how, and why – they do
not ‘reflect’ motives, they are motives.”
25
On the other hand, I contend that symbols are
not just passive instruments to be used but in turn, exert an active impact on self and
society – they help constitute who we are and why we act. As Foucault suggests, subjects
are the “effect” of language: "The different forms of speaking subjectivity [are] effects
proper to the enunciative field."
26

Based on the categorical confusion displayed in the Falun Gong discourse, I raise the
following research questions: How do topical motifs, or topoi, move to organize
symbolic materials and rhetorical transactions in defining the critical moments (there are
three of them) of the Falun Gong movement? In particular, I want to illuminate the
manner in which the topoi were mobilized and elaborated in naming rhetorical situations,
organizing available symbolic resources and addressing rhetorical conflicts during the
formative stages of Falun Gong. My premise is two-fold: First, representations are not
16
passive reflections of reality but motivated symbolic means responsive to historical
exigency; they work by “inducing cooperation [and division] in beings that by nature
respond to symbols.”
27
Second, it is feasible to locate in one class of discourse a limited
number of recurrent rhetorical constructs which embody and give rise to, in their
permutations and metamorphosis, images, beliefs, narratives, logics, propositions, etc.

My theses can be summarized as follows: The formative stages of the Falun Gong
movement exhibit the consistent presence/absence of four topoi, namely health, religion,
politics and family; collectively, the four topoi define Falun Gong’s reality within the
period under research. Through charting the trajectory and the layout of the four topoi,
we can gain a better understanding of the Falun Gong movement as it progressed over
time. The topoi derived their specific meanings from China’s cultural context which
called them into shape as they were appropriated, arranged and manipulated by the
concerned individuals to address situational needs. The topic arrangement at one
particular moment reflected the historical contingency in which they were grounded.

My observation is anticipated and corroborated by existing scholarly literature on
Falun Gong, which is still limited but slowly building up. Scholars of Qigong and Falun
Gong generally acknowledge the classificatory difficulty of their subject matter, which,
in Evelyn Micollier’s words, is “a 'neo-traditional' set of health practices and
beliefs…difficult to fit into pre-constructed categories.”
28
But the solution they have
17
offered is to tackle the complexity of the issue through approaching specific lines of
inquiry -- primarily according to their own disciplinary training. A brief survey reveals
that religion, politics, family and health are precisely the lines dividing academic interests
and researches. Just to name a few:

Religion. The temporal sensitivity (near Y2K) of Falun Gong’s public eruption
attracted, above all, scholars of religious studies. Despite the fact that China was then
situated at a historical juncture very different from that of the West and the “cult” label
doled out by the Chinese government was in service of a blunt propaganda drive, scholars
of religion and the New Religious Movements (NRM) nevertheless felt obligated to come
to terms with Falun Gong in relation to “cult”. Indeed, they were the ones who initiated
academic interests in Falun Gong. Among them, Stephen O’Leary asked if “cult” was
deliberately adopted by the Chinese state to tailor to the Western taste.
29
Noah Porter
conducted a lengthy ethnographic research in Florida seeking to (in)validate the “cult”
claim.
30
Dutch Sinologist Vermander uses Falun Gong as a lens to query various aspects
of China’s religious policy and non-authorized religious groups.
31
David Ownby, a
veteran researcher of Chinese folk religions, views Falun Gong as but a recent
embodiment of China’s long line of folk religious tradition, which is made up of what he
calls various “redemptive societies.”
32
Ownby’s research is particularly enlightening as
he describes the definitional difficulty of historical redemptive societies by underscoring
their questionable legitimacy. According to Ownby, despite being influential and
18
claiming hundreds of thousands of members, historical redemptive societies always
suffered from the lack of a unified official recognition (unlike Buddhism or Taoism).
Consequently, they came to adopt an assortment of names such as “charitable society,”
“philanthropic society” and “marital arts and healing society.” Doing so not only
splintered them into seemingly incompatible factions, but also prevented them from
developing a historically continuous self-identity, increasing their vulnerability to
reigning political whim. What is happening between the Chinese state and Falun Gong,
suggests Ownby, is but another instance of this recurrent historical dynamics that has
been haunting China since the imperial times. Scholars adopting religious perspectives
agree that whether Falun Gong is perceived as “cult” or “religion” is critical for its
popular image. While “religion” affords the movement respectability and moral
superiority and pins the blame on the Chinese government as a human rights abuser, the
“cult” accusation, if proven valid, depicts the movement as a nuisance which “threatens
public order, national security, public health or morals” and hence deserves extirpation.
33

Family. Secondary literatures on Falun Gong taking a family perspective are rare.
Those which do exist are from representatives of the anti-cult movement – Margaret
Singer for one,

who, encountering Falun Gong toward the end of her illustrious long
career, hastily deposited it into her collection as yet another specimen of coercive
persuasion and mind control.
34
From the standpoint of the anti-cult movement, family is
to be conceived as the ambience predisposing one to cultic manipulation, a victim of cult
19
in and of itself, and eventually a crusader against cult. Some scholars suggest that the
“intimacy” between a social movement like Falun Gong and the Chinese state resembles
that between “family members.” Viewing China’s political dynamics through a family
metaphor, Michael Greenlee elects not to situate the Chinese government vs. Falun Gong
conflict as one between state and society, but an example of “a king devouring his own
children.”
35
Family not only inflects political discourses, but also stands in a close
relationship to health. Indeed, family is integral to the notion of health: It develops and
maintains one’s sense of well-being; it supplies a sanctuary where wounds are dressed
and health nurtured. In certain cultures, a fractured family is itself a sign of “dis-ease,”
affecting the subjectively perceived criteria of individual and group health.
36
The fact
that family has been interpreted as a sign of purity and wholeness lends it to be viewed as
a zone most vulnerable to outside intruders, be it “diseases,” “pathogens,” or “cults.”

Health. Health is the most frequently cited motive for practitioners of Qigong and
Falun Gong.
37
Correspondingly, the health perspective is generally accepted by medical
anthropologists keen on interpreting social phenomena through the natives’ point of view.
Medical anthropologists account for Qigong’s therapeutic effects through locating
aspects of Qigong that enable “charismatic healing” or “embodied cathartic healing.”
Borrowing from ethnic definition of health, medical anthropologists view health as not
limited to individual physical state but encompassing a broad sense of well-being based
in connectedness between mind and body, self and community, and man and universe.
20
For instance, Nancy Chen offers a convincing account of how Qigong enables a space
against urban fragmentation and state penetration.
38
Thomas Ots addresses the
experiential “liveliness” augmented through bodily practices as a source of meaning and
transcendence.
39
According to Vermander, the Falun Gong movement “has brought to
light” “a latent demand for salvation” via its request for “physical and moral health.”
40

Politics. Leland Griffin states that “all movements are essentially political, concerned
with governance and dominion.”
41
In light of Griffin’s observation, “politics” seems to
be a most natural line of inquiry put to study the Falun Gong phenomenon. The political
perspective claims political scientists, sociologists, scholars of law and communication
scholars alike. Political scientists such as James Tong and Elizabeth Perry interested in
the regime side of the story have set out to study the state apparatuses and institutional
processes involved in the crackdown.
42
Law scholar Robin Munro uses Falun Gong as an
example of political and forensic abuse of psychiatry.
43
Sociologists such as Patricia
Thornton and Kevin McDonald examining social action possibilities have located the
movement’s agency in its capacity to “frame dissent” “evocatively” by adopting “a
unique civilizational grammar.”
44
Communication scholar Chiung Hwang Chen draws
attention to the propaganda discourse released by the official Xinhua agency whereas
Zhao Yuezhi sheds light on Falun Gong’s counter-propaganda campaign. Leeshai Lemish
researches the role played by the Western media in covering stories of “remote
suffering.”
45
Xiao Min, attempting a synthetic reading, illuminates the cultural politics
21
that gives rise to the Falun Gong phenomenon.
46

It is no accident that scholars have adopted schemes of interpretation roughly along the
lines of religion, family, health, and politics, for these topoi are guideposts social agents
come to identify with and organize their behaviors around. While existing scholarship
recognizes the fact that parameters of the movement can be condensed into a few topical
themes, proceeding from one specific discipline as they do narrows the scope of research:
It makes one consciously or unconsciously latch onto one or two particular terms without
questioning how the symbolic constructs came into being in the first place, nor can it
integrate all the relevant labels in a holistic view, as Falun Gong’s syncretistic nature thus
demands. Rather, pursuing individual stories reinforces the “schism,” unknowingly gives
“supremacy” to one or two labels, and sheds little light on the map collectively inhabited
by categories of less than distinct boundaries. Existing works more or less treat labels as
pre-determined and fixed containers rather than floating signifiers to be called forth and
given shape by individuals pursuant to contexts and goals. A static reading like this
disregards the specific action involved in naming, neglects the spatial, multi-topoi
make-up which has come to define a particular historical moment, and contributes little to
illustrating topoi’s chronological development and tonality shifts as the movement
evolves over time.

22
The present study, indebted to insights provided by existent scholarship, offers a
comprehensive framework which understands the assembly of topoi as building blocks
for discourses defining Falun Gong’s formative stages. True to the metaphor of “building
blocks” and from a dramatistic point of view, topoi function as construction materials and
tools. They are speech acts to accomplish tasks, whose mobilization is influenced by
predetermined symbolic conventions (static “form”) and contingent factors (fluid
“content”). Doing so allows critics to 1) study the discursive formation of the movement
rather than focus on discussing identity and essence; 2) interpret categorical confusions as
instances promising ingenuity and creativity; 3) gain insight into agent’s motives,
available rhetorical resources and historical exigencies for which topical arrangements
are shorthand; 4) and evaluate public actions and civic engagements as consequences of
rhetorical strategies. Commenting on the effect of symbols on action, Ruth Block states
that it can be “a spur to action, as a source of comfort, and as a rationale for passivity.”
47

In simple terms, going back to the “categorical confusion” raised at the beginning of this
section, the “mishmash” identified in reference to Falun Gong offers critics useful clues.
It suggests we should move away from locating the one right label to locating the spatial
make-up and chronological movement of the labels. Doing so draws on inspirations
offered by Burke’s dramatism which approaches reality as a result of ongoing symbolic
interactions.
23
I acknowledge that my research does not encompass the entirety of the Falun Gong
time span—a daunting task beyond the scope of this work. I am only interested in Falun
Gong’s formative period, characterized by debates and fluid definitional games (in
contrast to the subsequent stand-off). The trajectory to be isolated spans five decades,
from the 1950s to 2001, and includes three critical moments. The first moment is
defined by “health” as the key term, and can be divided into two phases. The first phase
saw the birth, rise, suppression and resurgence of modern-day Qigong, from which Falun
Gong descents. Qigong heralded Falun Gong, its historical formation coming to bear on
Falun Gong in terms of semiotic constitution and institutional positioning. During
Qigong’s legitimating process, it lost the “superstition” charge, acquired a “health” name,
and forged a temporary pact with “science” in the late 1970s and early 1980s – laying the
ground for Falun Gong’s appearance and acceptance. The second phase took place in the
1990s, when Falun Gong, a late arrival to the so-called “Qigong fervor,” was ushered into
the pre-established “health” container.
48
Thus positioned, Falun Gong followers took
advantage of “health” as an umbrella term to channel desires and aspirations (religious
and political sentiments included) in a way acquiesced and even welcomed by the
Chinese state. This period prior to Falun Gong’s public fallout with the Chinese
government is now looked upon (sometimes nostalgically) as the movement’s golden age.
The second moment is marked by eruptions and crises. Following Falun Gong’s mass
protest at the central leadership compound in Beijing, a propaganda war was mounted in
full gear. In the official narratives, the “health” story, by then fractured and dropped,
24
made way for other names. A controversy arose, engaging such terms as “politics,”
“religion,” and “family” in various formations, and unleashed onto the public in a heavy
propaganda barrage. It was a moment of guilt and victimage which highlighted the
violation of two orders, namely the religio-political order and the order of domestic polity.
The final moment of the state vs. society conflict was triggered by one event, i.e. the
so-called “Falun Gong’s self-immolation at Tiananmen Square.” For Falun Gong
followers who alleged that the incident was a staged media event, self-immolation
signaled the culmination of the propaganda war and alienated the movement into a
“rebellious” position; for the average Chinese audiences, the same incident completely
invalidated Falun Gong’s “health” appeals. As the official discourse seized onto
“self-immolation” to bring out the full force of the “cult” accusation, the rhetorical
constructs of “health,” “family,” “religion” and “politics” all came to the fore in a
“captivity” narrative. Apparently, the three stages roughly correspond to the tri-step
dramatistic structure of “inception” (problems are fermenting but still containable within
the system), “rhetorical crisis” (a period of open conflict marked by intense debates and
disputes) and “consummation” (conflict resolved).
49
Considering the Falun Gong
phenomenon is still an on-going dispute which as of now sees no prospect of resolution,
“consummation” can be usefully replaced with “impasse” which sets the stage for further
contestation at a global scale.
25
Looking forward, I project “politics” to be an omnipotently mobilizing force tweaking
and bending things per the dominant political whim. Although it might not be materially
visible as a designator, given its sensitivity and coerciveness under authoritarianism, the
political construct might work by way of covert “politicization.” When “politics” does
make its appearance as a socio-linguistic entity, however, it is often used by propaganda
discourse to put down activists as hostile “political meddlers.” Whether aboveboard or
under the table, in both cases “politics” is a repressive and censorial term activists need to
work with and work around. “Family” delineates a zone encompassing and inflecting the
Chinese state/society conflict in the direction of paternalistic politics; it is also an
important inventional resource informing anti-cultic narratives. “Religion” as officially
understood in the context of China only refers to a limited number of established faiths
and is never available as a label to unofficial spiritual practices such as Qigong and Falun
Gong. What’s more, Marxism and scientism pressure “religion” to spin off a bastardly
portion of itself known as “superstition” which is then made into a prison house for
illegitimate theistic beliefs and practices. The antithesis between “science” and
“superstition” requires all unofficial religions to navigate away from the ideological
minefield and hopefully find a partner in “science.” I expect “health,” like “science,” to
be another constructive term, warranting the value of things. In the case of Falun Gong
“health” could be regarded as the master construct because 1) temporally it defines the
chronological beginning (by constituting the movement’s original appeal) and the end
(when the health story was deconstructed in “cult’s self-burning” ) of Falun Gong as a
26
viable and visible movement in China; 2) semantically, the normative and recuperative
aspects of “health” places it in league with “politics,” “religion” and “family,” and bodes
well for “health” to filter the other three constructs as a master lens.

Some might disagree on the adequacy of “health” as the lead construct for the study of
Falun Gong, and scholars holding this point of view often suggest instead that
“millenarianism” or “apocalyptic studies” be adopted as the primary research angle.

As
far as this current investigation is concerned, I will not follow their opinions for the
following reasons.
50
Periodically,

Falun Gong has exhibited a discernible “two-tier”
development from a movement of healing to a movement of protest. In Susan Palmer’s
words, Falun Gong started out as “a quest for healing and power, for the mysterious force
latent in ancient ‘cultivation practices’,” which is akin to traditional medicine or holistic
medicine.
51
Gradually, “apocalyptic ideology” started to intensify under the mounting
pressure of the persecution campaign.
52
Calls to “assist the master to eliminate demons”
in a “cosmic battle of good and evil” have translated into commitments to protest and an
end in itself, redefining the cause.
53
But since my research is concerned with the
formative stages where millenarian notion was minimally visible in moral laments of
societal decline and calls for rejuvenation and renewal through individual and community
health praxis, I would not deem millenarianism an adequate line of research for my
project. Second, with the escalation of the repressive campaign and the shift in the
movement’s message, a large portion of Falun Gong practitioners have indeed come to
27
understand the movement as doubly concerned with global human rights and a cosmic
resolution of evils.
54
However, Li Hongzhi has been repeatedly cautioning his followers
to “stay rational,” and not bring in “gods and demons” in casual talks with non-believers.
As he stresses, “there is no need to tell these things to the ordinary people,”

and human
rights is still the preferred angle to promote the cause:

“You can't talk about things at
too high of a level…So when you clarify the truth you absolutely must not speak at too
high of a level. Right now when you clarify the truth you only need to talk about the
persecution of Falun Dafa disciples, [the] violating of the human rights and the freedom
of belief of the Chinese people…That’s enough.”
55

56
In consistence with his
admonition, there is a strictly enforced distinction between literatures for insiders and
those for outsiders. It is also my impression that the majority of Falun Gong publications
targeting the general audience refrain from (over-)using “catastrophes” or “apocalypse”
as persuasive constructs. On the contrary, I think it is fair to say that it is the Chinese
government that is eager to exploit Falun Gong’s possible linkage to Western cults and
happy to cast Falun Gong in apocalyptic and self-destructive light. Because of the
aforementioned reasons, for the period of time under my investigation, “health” should be
the leading term, and I contend that any apocalyptic-sounding rhetoric in the instance of
“decline and regeneration” can also be subsumed in the construct of “health/healing.”

For primary materials, I will rely on online posts, government circulars and decrees,
news reports posted online and retrievable in Lexis-Nexis, personal communications and
28
scholarly journals containing first-hand accounts. With regard to the history of Qigong, a
topic which has been well-researched, whose trajectory now by and large a consensus in
the academic circle, both firsthand and secondary materials are abundantly collected and
available in journals, books and online posts. To gather health narratives from the
movement, in addition to pamphlets, fliers, booklets and online blogs put out by the
group, I find personal communications more valuable than anything else in terms of
gaining in-depth, rich, and detailed descriptions. I understand that utilizing personal
communications might alter this dissertation’s methodology from one centered in
rhetorical movement and bounded texts to something more “fluid” and “hybrid,” but it is
justified in view of the distinct communication behaviors and transactions found in
practitioners’ health talks and illness narratives. Far from displaying an explicit rhetorical
tendency to move, persuade and strategize, insiders’ accounts tend to be expressive and
impressionistic, usually generated as vague memory and called into shape as speakers
search for words to describe actions and feelings -- in them are buried the “seeds” of
latent worldviews, values and sentiments that in time would grow into explicit
consciousness. As far as propaganda rhetoric is concerned, since the Falun Gong
controversy evolved into a rhetorical crisis, both the Chinese propaganda machine and
Falun Gong’s counter-media operatives have done a good job of storing the propaganda
discourses so there is no shortage of them.

29
Critical Perspective: A Social Constructionist Approach to Reality

Terms

For Burke, language is not a passive reflection of reality but a selection and deflection
of reality. From this symbolic constructionist point of view, language represents
rhetorical moves and motives through which we achieve identification with and division
from others. Burke writes that "the basic function of rhetoric” is “the use of words by
human agents to form attitudes or induce actions in other human agents.”
57

A key concept for Burke is the terministic screen, which refers to a set of symbols or
terms that make up schemata of intelligibility through which the world makes sense to
us.
58
Not all terms occupy the same weight. God-terms, according to Burke (who call
them “ultimate terms”), unifies a diversity of related or competing terms. Because they
accommodate the dominant view on reality over and above what is available through
other terms, god-terms are the “names for the ultimates of motivation.”
59
Richard
Weaver expands on Burke by adding “devil-terms” as the mirror image of “god-terms.”

He also notes that "god-terms" are context-specific and usually vague, but have "inherent
potency" in their meanings. Words such as “progress” and “freedom” typify god-terms
which seem ideologically impenetrable and automatically endorsing. By contrast, "devil
terms" are phrases carrying negative evaluations.
60

30
One can detect a parallel between “god-terms” and McGee’s concept of ideograph.
Ideograph, also semantically ambivalent, condenses social norms and sanctifying visions
as warrant for thought and behavior. I will propose that among the topoi under study,
“health,” “family” and “science” can be construed as “god-terms” which compel and
endorse actions, whereas “politics” and “superstition” (the derogative variant of
“religion,” the putative “other” of science) are the “devil-terms” carrying negative
connotations and deterring actions.

Topoi

Traditionally meaning “common places” for rhetorical inventions, topoi are described
by Michael Leff as “notoriously ambiguous, and even in its technical uses, its meaning
ranges from recurrent themes appearing in a certain kind of discourse to abstract patterns
of inference.”
61
Developing Leff’s insight, O’Leary employs topoi to refer “both to the
recurring themes and subjects of a narrative, “and to the characteristic patterns of
reasoning or ‘lines of argument’ that give shape to the interpretive discourse that
surrounds the narrative.”
62
Both Leff and O’Leary point to the “content” side of topoi --
they function as building blocks and standing reserves (stock imageries and metaphors,
field-specific narratives and propositions) of a set of discourses. To them, topoi also work
as the organizing principles by supplying logic, syntax, and explanatory schemata of the
field. Richard Weaver complicates this conceptualization by emphasizing topic’s spatial
31
origin. As he writes, “They are a set of ‘places’ or ‘regions’ where one can go to find the
substance for persuasive argument…the seat of argument.”
63
I take Weaver to mean that
topoi, in addition to providing direct content and interpretive frames, open a horizon and
offer a vantage point to gather and mold experiences into shape – they work by being
suggestive and evocative. Combining their perspectives, I suggest topoi refer to contents,
syntaxes, and loci. Sometimes a topos encompasses the recurrent motifs and conventional
patterns of reasoning of a discourse; sometimes a topos in and of itself is a world
embodying the hierarchy of worth (order) which guides actions in the field; sometimes a
topos connotes a roughly delineated field of elastic perimeter where one chances upon
propositions, narratives, arguments and interpretations, and where one’s experiences and
sentiments are given a voice and molded into shape.

Topoi are situated and motivated symbolic actions advanced by rhetors seeking to
address situational exigencies. Although bearing formal traits, topoi are not pure forms or
clearly defined formulae; rather, they indicate the rhetorician’s “relationship to the
world…which forces the rhetorician to keep an eye upon reality as well as upon the
character and situation of his audience.”
64
Topoi are akin to a standing reserve waiting
to be selectively uncovered and arranged into arguments and narratives; they “only
assume propositional form as individuals and groups confront specific lived situations.”

65
The specific form topoi take reflects the situation in which they are embedded, the
cultural resources at the rhetor’s disposal, and the rhetor’s attitude and competence.
32
The “common” aspect of “common places” highlights the fact that topoi are
recognizable entities rooted in cultural familiarity which affords persuasiveness. For the
“psychology of the audience” to have desires “aroused” in order to be “fulfilled,” the
audience and the rhetorician must rely on established signs and collective consciousness.

66
That is why Aristotle would view “commonplaces” as representing “a quick survey of
opinions” of “things people generally perceive persuasive.” As such, the conventional
tropes and figures involved in topical invention are grounds to proclaim co-substantiality
and identification; they function as norms and evaluations of worth which organize
arguments and reconcile conflicts. While having a certain “routine-ness” to it, topoi
mutate as well, as people work and rework the meanings over time, investing old topoi
with periodic tonality, rehashing and reordering them to cope with the task at hand, be it
to separate self from the other, recruit sympathizers, combat an enemy, dodge
defamations and slanders, etc.

Topoi do not work alone. Critics have emphasized the importance of topical clustering.
Burke labels one of his procedures “statistical,” suggesting that critics should gather “lists
of recurrent terms” to get a sense of “which are essential—which terms cluster and
where.”
67
For Burke, evaluative judgments are embedded in the connotative linkage of
the terms. Echoing Burke, Sonia Foss notes that critics gain “insights into rhetors” and
their ideologies through analyzing the “terministic screens evidenced in rhetoric.”
68
The
clustering of topics not only reveals the symbolic coherence and hierarchical order
33
between the terms, it embodies processes of pollution, purification and redemption.
69

Topics cluster in a variety of formats, by way of mutual generation and association,
inter-referencing and reinforcing, cancelling off of each other, etc. The way the topical
fabric changes over time offers clues to changes in situations, motives and objectives. It
should also be noted that the linguistic withdrawal of one term does not negate its implied
presence.

A Dramatistic Perspective on Social Movement

Burke offers the foundational theory to approach a movement vis-à-vis the structure
from a dramatistic perspective. For him rhetorical movement (or any symbolic actions)
can be conceived in dramatistic terms which encompass a range of motives and
corresponding rituals: Alienation from the Order begets Guilt which results in Victimage
or Mortification and hence the restoration of the old Order or the establishment of a new
one. This basic model is expanded by Leland Griffin who emphasizes reciprocity
between the aggressor and defendant orators; he also outlines the pattern (what he calls
the “form”) of a movement which progresses from “inception,” through “development”
or “crisis,” to finally reach “consummation.”
70
Robert Cathcart adds nuances to the
Griffin paradigm by positing moral incommensurability between the status quo and the
movement. According to him the “reciprocity” or “dialectic enjoinment” between the
agent of change and the status quo evolves in cycles and by way of misunderstanding. In
34
this process, by refusing to accommodate the “dynamic understanding of the system” as
requested by the movement, the status quo often manages to alienate a reformist group
into genuine antagonists.
71
Cathcart further distinguishes what he calls the “managerial
movement” from the “true movement” which rejects the fundamentals of the reigning
structure. For him, only confrontational movement is worthy of critical attention for it
declines to merely “correct or re-right the prevailing order” but is committed to
“attack[ing] the foundations of the established order.”
72
Carson complicates the Cathcart
model even further, by pointing out that a movement does not have to pursue the agenda
of “toppling the system” in a “rite of the kill.” In her view a movement of comic frame
could still expose the system as a system and raise awareness among people without
exacting a heavy price.
73
In Carson’s view, comic frame deserves more attention for its
charitable view on human mistakes – viewing them as correctable “follies” instead of
incorrigible “sins” – and its sympathy for humankind including the “enemy.” What
Griffin, Cathcart and Carson share in common is to read the “form” of the movement in
light of its motive and rationale which unfolds in an interactive setting. As Cathcart puts
it, “Movement is a form related to a rationale and a purpose…one which gives substance
to its rationale and purpose.”
74

To apply the dramatistic approach to the conflict between Falun Gong and the Chinese
Party state, one needs to query what kind of motives (guilt, disturbance of hierarchy,
identification, alienation, rationalization, etc.) account for what rhetorical moves and
35
what structural “form” the movement assumes when its legitimacy and identity at stake. I
will not describe the rhetorical form of the movement under study as purely
“confrontational,” “managerial,” or “comic.” Falun Gong started as an “in-group” of
grievance and discontent within the status quo, pursing a “private” place of
self-cultivation and healing rather than an explicit sphere of public engagement –
whatever “suspicion” it might harbor over the system was displaced to and incorporated
in the therapeutic praxis, and in the inception period the movement was primarily
concerned with obtaining legitimacy from the authorities and self-development. The
public breakout signaled the failure of the private endeavors which compelled the
movement to push the boundary of the previous set-up. The established order, in return,
perceived the managerial request as confrontational and responded with repressive
measures. A couple of years into the crackdown, however, the movement still stayed a
reformist group, defending its legitimacy by citing its loyalty to the authorities, while
hoping for benign institutional changes to “rehabilitate” its status. Finally, with little
improvement in the situation, the tension escalated to a point to call on the movement to
reinvent its motives and stories. An irreparable rupture occurs as the movement proclaims
that the regime is morally corrupt, has lost its raison d'être and should best be scrapped.
In terms of the broad strokes of the movement, we have witnessed inception, crisis and
impasse; yet within each stage, the rhetorical forms are variegated, reflecting various
situational needs. It is important to understand how the forms are exhibited, what are the
forces shaping them and in turn shaped by them.
36
A complete understanding of rhetorical movement requires the combination of topical
analysis and dramatism. Dramatism offers an approach to read motives and plots as they
unfold between the state and society in the sequence of time, but the dynamics of
behaviors is realized through topical themes and their mobilization. Take the Falun Gong
movement for example, which has traversed through different stages of motives –
survival under secular authoritarianism, self-development, repairing the breached order,
counter-oppression. At each moment, the synchronistic arrangement of topoi is an
embodiment of rhetoricians’ relationship with the world as “individuals and groups
confront specific lived situation.”
75
Topoi are no less than building blocks called into
action by the drive and motive dramatism has done a good job at illustrating. It is also my
contention that to query the “patterns” of a movement we should go beyond the “three
stages” (inception, crisis, consummation), “two forms” (form of acceptance and form of
rejection), and the classical array of rituals (Guilt, Kill, Redemption, Mortifiaciton). In
tracing the synchronic layout and diachronic transformation of a movement critics should
be sensitive to whatever “form” – atypical expression and association in particular – that
gives substance to the rationale and purpose of a movement.

Chapter Organization

Paralleling the trajectory of Falun Gong’s development, the organization of the
chapters will be as follows:
37
Chapter 2 seeks to illuminate the symbolic terrain giving rise to the movement by
providing a review of the four topoi as they are contextually defined. The understanding
is that the four terms are like a standing reserve the movement taps into as it emerges,
grows, revives and resists structural constraints. In the process of parsing out the
connotations of the four topoi, I will also argue for “health,” “family” and “Science”
(with a capitalized “s”) to be viewed as sanctioning “God-terms,” “politics” as a negative
term which deters ground-up social actions, and “religion” as a morally neutral term.
Chapter 2 will suggest that “superstition” is the derogatory subset of “religion,”
something always mobilized against, and the quintessential “other” of “Science.”

Chapter 3 describes the birth and resurgence of Qigong in the 1950s and 1980s. As
what was once considered “feudal superstition” was legitimized as a socialist health and
science category, the function and interrelation of “health,” “religion,” “science” and
“politics” were on full display. Chapter 3 illuminates the manner in which “health” and
“science” absolved Qigong of its “superstitious” burdens. It also demonstrates that a
persistent political imperative was at work which enabled polluting （tying Qigong with
“superstition” ） as well as cleansing (recuperating Qigong’s therapeutic component). It
should be noted that the emphasis of this chapter is on institutional discourses
legitimating Qigong’s identity through negotiating the constructs of health, religion,
science and politics.

38
Chapter 4 can be seen as a complement to and continuation of chapter 3. Together they
address how Qigong approximated “health” as a legitimating device. If Chapter 3
explores the institutional processes centered on “health” (and to a lesser extent,
“science”), Chapter 4 offers interviews and accounts collected among practitioners of
Qigong and Falun Gong. Through describing the interiors of individual Qigong and Falun
Gong practitioners situated at a unique historical juncture, I intend to tease out the
polysemy of “health” as it is phenomenologically lived and perceived by those inhabiting
the “health” space. This chapter describes how “health” as a versatile construct mediates
spiritual longings and latent political grievances. In other words, “health” was set up to
cover and channel religious sentiments and political aspirations that are not openly
expressable. Chapter 3 and 4, put together, present a holistic picture of Qigong’s birth
and resurgence in socialist China which marked the first moment on Falun Gong’s
developmental trajectory. Falun Gong, riding on the heel of the Qigong boom sweeping
China in the 1980s (Falun Gong is also considered a denomination of Qigong), was
readily ushered into the health category carved out by Qigong.

The equilibrium defined by health was shattered in the movement’s first falling-out
with the Party state. Guilt arouse as the old Order was challenged and called for
resolution. Chapter 5 deals with the period of rhetorical crisis in which, in the state-led
campaign against Falun Gong, the government assumed the stance of an aggressive
rhetorician, hurling forth allegations and attacks against the movement. Revealed in the
39
propaganda campaign were two “orders” considered most significantly violated: the
religio-poltical order and domestic polity, both prominently practiced in the Chinese
context. The government’s endeavor to reclaim and reassert these two orders can be
characterized as one of Victimage: compromises and accommodation are out of the
question; you have to repent and do as I demand.

The game of “othering” reached its peak in the so-called “self-immolation” saga which
supposedly imploded the “health” appeal Falun Gong was most notably known for. The
cult charge launched against Falun Gong, not fully materialized in the previous
propaganda rhetoric, was given substance in “deranged cultists burning themselves to
death at Tiananmen.” Chapter 6, documenting the climax of the anti-Falun Gong
campaign, focuses on analyzing the persuasive appeal of what I would call “captive
narratives” made out of the self-immolation incident. I will suggest that the successful
forging of captivity narratives hinges on the alleged loss of “agent-hood” for those
involved in self-burning – their actions were then attributable to mind control by the
“cult” instead of out of their own accord. The story of abduction, duping, and
self-destruction, if established per the official account, would seal Falun Gong’s popular
image as “a public disease.” All four terms were mobilized to a heightened degree: Falun
Gong was rendered as a religion having gone astray, detrimental to family and health, and
calling for intervention by the state apparatuses.

40
The concluding chapter briefly reviews and repeats the thesis that the essential topoi
defining the Falun Gong discourse consist of religion, health, politics and family. It
argues that the topical mobilization thus revealed affords insight into China’s public life
and helps illuminate the particular form a movement such as Falun Gong has to adopt. It
also goes beyond the period under investigation to examine Falun Gong’s current state
which exhibits a certain apocalyptic tendency as a result of the intensification of the
conflict. Finally, on a theoretical note, the concluding chapter reflects on the mingling of
participant interviews with bounded texts as collected data and suggests that a hybrid
strategy such as this provides a fresh perspective and expands the subject matter of what
should be considered rhetorical.

Limitations and Scope

As tradition demands, those writing about religions, controversial ones in particular,
should identify their own relationship to the subject matter under study, and inform the
reader how this relationship might influence research angle and agenda. So some
clarifications are in order here.

Growing up in China during the Qigong boom of the 1980s and the 1990s, I had the
opportunity to observe and experience the Qigong phenomena firsthand. As a teen, my
own myopia was temporarily cured through Qigong exercises (until China’s notorious
41
college entrance exam preparation took a toll again) taught at a Chinese medicine
outpatient clinic. When I guided the movement of the Qi by regulating breathing and
using mind-intent, I could clearly feel energy travelling along bodily meridians, filling up
acupuncture points and organs. Some of my friends experienced more miraculous
sensations. One told me how during Qigong-induced trance he felt lifted up into space,
not feeling his bodily weight or the ground under his feet; another (never trained in
medicine) was able to “grab” Qi from the universe and apply to patients’ affected parts of
the body. When Falun Gong came along, many an amateur Qigong practitioner like me
was both dumbfounded and overjoyed: The Buddhist and Taoist symbolism contained in
Falun Gong was very refreshing for those of us having had little exposure to religion of
any sort due to public schooling of atheism; and the strong sensations and affects incurred
in practice were relaxing and empowering. To us, Falun Gong offers a comprehensive
body-based system of cultivation of physical perfection and spiritual transcendence. It is
also a system promoting personal access to sacredness as opposed to through a mediator,
privileging experiences, senses, feelings and epiphanies rather than formulated beliefs.

Unbeknownst to us taking up Falun Gong in late 1990s, we were soon pushed to the
“conflict” phase when the Chinese government launched the suppression campaign.
Many of my fellow Falun Gong practitioners in North America split their time between
private cultivation (exercises, meditation, book-reading, etc) and public activism. So did I,
joining some of the parades, sit-ins, and press conferences they organized, feeling along
42
with them the ebb and flow of emotions ranging from wanting dialogues with the
government and hoping for a quick resolution to losing patience and accepting
confrontation as a routine state of affair, not a problem to be solved in a quick stroke.

This dissertation represents an academic effort to make sense of the movement of
which I am a participant. While I am aware how being a participant grants me unhindered
access to meetings, rallies and insiders’ stories, I also acknowledge the bounded space in
which I am situated, and am careful in not having my intimacy with the group hamper the
research. To that end I intentionally distanced myself from my fellow practitioners for a
couple of years, both emotionally and intellectually. The gap hence opened afforded a
critical edge and facilitated contemplation, allowing me to reconsider experiences and
data gathered. In the process of applying “alien” concepts and notions to filter something
I knew so closely, some of my previous assumptions altered significantly. For example,
“heroes” turned out to be not that “heroic” on occasions, with their agency compromised
by the context they lived in. For example, given the havoc wreaked by the suppression
campaign, or even, despite the havoc wreaked by the suppression campaign, I seriously
started to ponder, on top of the call for justice, what could be the conditions for pardoning
and reconciliation, which is a line of thinking bound to incur strong reaction and dismay
among some of my Falun Gong friends. At any rate, in my view this space of observation
and reflection has proven to be both necessary and productive, enabling one to reach a
sympathetic understanding with the community concerned while upholding academic
43
integrity.

Now, let me say a few words about what this dissertation is and is not about.

This dissertation is a rhetorical analysis of Falun Gong’s identification trajectory.
Before I proceed to elaborate on what it means to be “rhetorical,” some might point to the
coerced nature of the discourse under study and doubt to what extent it could be
genuinely considered “rhetorical.” Indeed: Although hardly mentioned by scholars
working with rhetorical data concerning China and Chinese politics, it is arguable
whether discourses penetrated by authoritarian influences can measure up to the standard
of “rhetorical analysis.” As Hugh Duncan emphatically states, communication theories
are not about “authority beyond doubt and rejection, but of how authority is achieved in
doubt and rejection. We must think of authority (and certainly democratic authority) as a
resolution of contending voices through some kind of social transcendence which is
not…determined by ‘social forces,’ but open to reason and unreason.”
76
By Duncan’s
criteria, apparently the rhetorical problem Falun Gong poses cannot be resolved through
mere “reason and unreason” but is the very tortuous product of violence and its reaction.
However, by pointing to the existence of propaganda discourses released by the Chinese
state, I contend that even an authoritarian state in control of all established media outlets
still needs persuasion to legitimize its rule. As such, there is at least some leeway for
symbols, away from violence, to move and persuade.
44
Rhetorical maneuvers are most pronouncedly evidenced in movement participants
using symbols to circumvent harms and advance their own interests. Working with
limited discursive freedom and in an already circumscribed role, those agents of change
made the most of whatever little leverage they had combating the structural constrains, at
times using the body as a select vehicle of expression and civic engagement. As their
stance toward the status quo shifted from being soft and loyal to rejecting and
confrontational, they also shifted allegiance away from the reigning symbols of authority
in search of new object of identification. This process provides ample data for rhetorical
analyses and inquiries.

To write a dissertation from a rhetorical angle means a few things. Firstly, as
mentioned earlier, rhetoricans do not regard symbols as bearing so much “substance” or
“essence” as representing human motives and attitudes – they are coping methods in
service of rhetorical needs. Although Falun Gong’s identification has been associated
with such labels as “health,” “political dissidents,” and “cult,” a rhetorical scholar would
not be concerned with debating the veracity of these labels but interested in examining
the discursive formation of them, who said them, in what context, to what end, and
achieved what effect. From a rhetorical analysis point of view, identification labels are
indexical of socio-political contingencies and more importantly, instruments and
“strategies for dealing with situations,” their effectiveness evaluated against their
purported goal and the positive or negative social impact they generate.
77
This is how I
45
will approach the identification labels on the market. Secondly, language is viewed as
symbolic actions instead of static signifiers: It motivates, incites, unites, attacks,
alleviates, exonerates and divides. The central act for social actions, however, revolves
around “identification with the Order” and “dis-relation from the Order” with the
corresponding rituals. Any movement, Falun Gong included, can be viewed as a macro
drama in which a disaffected group negotiates its position relative to the Order which is a
mutuality of rule and service in a hierarchical form.
78
So, this dissertation adopts a state
vs. society framework and examines how symbolic means are deployed to enact authority
and overcome the “guilt” caused when authority is in doubt. Thirdly, although rhetorical
analysis is perceived to be predominantly concerned with “debate,” “argument” and
“dispute,” rhetorical scholars in fact always ask the ethical question of how human beings
can co-habit peacefully and transcend either symbolic or physical violence. Finding
against all odds the commonalities and shared premises of the warring parties in order to
minimize the tension should at least remain a lofty ideal. In this spirit, I view this
dissertation as making some baby steps in the direction of open dialogue and
reconciliation.

With the above said, this dissertation is not about examining (or rationalizing) “cults”
or groups holding alternative religious views. Any one breathing and living alongside
Falun Gong practitioners will immediately dismiss the “cult” accusation out of hand and
embrace these individuals as warm, decent, and intelligent human beings. The cultural
46
relevance of “cult” has had its days but has as of now by and large worn off, replaced by
the sociologically neutral “new religious movements.” Nor is this a study entirely
devoted to the “effect” of a semi-religious practice -- turning out good fathers,
responsible children and functional families. My interest does not lie in just rendering an
account of Falun Gong and evaluating its social efficacy in general but focused on those
aspects of the practice enabling an effective countering of the socially inflicted injustice
and ideological hegemony. After all, the story unfolds in a state vs society framework,
with grievances and grass root actions on one hand and established interests and state
apparatuses on the other. Readers expecting to read a thorough exposition of the Falun
Gong doctrines will be disappointed as well. They have the option to read Benjamin
Penny’s The Religion of Falun Gong, or even better, explore Li Hongzhi’s corpus on
their own, not through a mediator.
79
To the extent that oriental systems are embodied or
even body-centric rather than promoting a mind-body dualism, readers are encouraged to
experience the practice for themselves, to close eyes and move bodies to the beat of the
music, to touch, taste and breathe truths as feeling, sensing and moving beings.

I chose to situate my research in a limited time and space. Temporally, I have no wish
to extend as far back as the Han Dynasty two millennia ago and trace Falun Gong’s root
to the first religion-based uprising in the Yellow Turban Rebellion – historians are in a
better position to do that.
80
I confine my research to the few decades witnessing how an
“in-group” was born, revamped, accepted, and then pushed outside the mainstream
47
society. This periodical choice regarding the movement also affords analytical
convenience, for it exhibits a complete dramatic curve (inception, crisis and impasse) and
is at a relative distance from the here and now. The geographical scope of my
investigation is confined to the domestic Chinese world which is heavily dominated by
the official media, directly exposed to the dramatic shifts in Falun Gong’s public
identification, and hence deeply involved in discussions about Falun Gong’s “nature.” I
admit that such an orientation has by and large left out the movement’s diasporic branch
which might subscribe to a different set of mentalities and modes of discourse. Exploring
diasporic activism as it is situated in the global milieu and in exchange with its domestic
counterpart is not the goal of this present investigation, and dealing with such a topic
requires another book-length project. I also acknowledge that focusing on Falun Gong’s
domestic discourse might yield a lopsided picture, as doing so would inevitably give
premium weight to the state (being the louder one within China) at the expense of the
counter-rhetoric which is more vocal in the global arena.
48
Chapter Two
The Four Topoi: Setting up the Parameters

The first chapter sets forth a dramatistic approach to study the identity formation with
regards to the Falun Gong movement. It also suggests that the relevant discourses revolve
around four topoi, or four terms, i.e. “politics,” “religion,” “family” and “health,” and
Falun Gong’s early developmental track could be traced through navigating these four
terms. This chapter will examine the semantics of these topoi, the probable statements
and propositions the topoi embody, how they might shade into and influence each other,
and how topical propositions thus achieved might orient the actions of the concerned
discourse community. I do not claim my approach to the topoi in question offers an
exhaustive survey of their polysemy. Rather, my goal is to sift through the field to get an
idea of what topical aspects could be usefully employed in arguments and narratives
defining the movement under study.

Topoi derive their existence from conventional motifs and cultural sediments
constitutive of an a priori symbolic ambience not of the actors’ own making. In the
context of China, however, the topoi’s symbolic make-up owes a great deal to the
artificial intervention and manipulation on the part of the official cultural makers who
exert a forceful influence. Perry Link in Evening Chats in Beijing notes how deliberately
prescribed formulations and linguistic patterns are disseminated and partially enforced in
49
the public realm for the control over the understanding of issues.

Consequently, as he
points out, “living with official language” has spawned in China’s political culture
various coping strategies as people negotiate the official demands and their own life
needs.
81
Calling “formalized language” “a form of power,” Schoenhals further critiques
the restrictiveness of Chinese socio-linguistic codes which he views has contributed to an
“impoverishment” of available statements, propositions, syntaxes, styles, terms, and
tropes.
82
In the course of reading this chapter, readers will encounter the Chinese state as
a formidable cultural player, being the one who defines the parameter and sets the rules.
By shedding light on the culturally inflected meanings of these topoi, I seek to offer a
glimpse of the (somewhat ossified) Chinese political culture and how in that culture
people might “do things with words.”
83

This chapter will be divided into sections each devoted to the topical exegesis on
“politics,” “religion,” “family,” and “health.”

“Politics:” A Repressive and Polluting Term

This section will not discuss China’s political system, processes and institutions -
subject matters of political science; rather, I want to examine the significance, operation
and persuasive appeal of the term “politics,” a highly politicized word in and of itself, as
it is situated in China’s political culture. Few would dispute that despite China’s
50
economical liberalization and stunning growth over the past 30 years, politically the
regime still sticks to its authoritarian repressiveness. What is probably not well-known is
how the state manipulates the connotation of the term “politics.” This section will address
three characteristics of “politics” as a socio-linguistic construct: It is an off-putting term
by way of historical precedents and policy changeability; the official discourse employs
“politics” in negative contexts to deter popular uprisings but is able to shield the
government behaviors from being tainted by the derogatory burden of the same term; the
ostensibly “apolitical” means the public resort to allow them to circumvent the censors
while expressing latent political aspirations.

“Politics” is a Feared Term and Vehicle of Repression

The mentioning of “politics” to any ordinary Chinese would most likely induce
cringes, a furrowed forehead, a wry smile, or a quizzically half-raised eyebrow with “who
cares? I just want to mind my own business.” In fact, as many could testify, “politics” is a
feared and misunderstood category in China and many are in the habit of steering as clear
as possible off its dreadful course. Except in rare cases, the Chinese fear for “politics” -- a
veritable anathema -- is genuine and prevalent. Part of the fear can be traced to the state’s
heavy-handed rule. But most would attribute political antipathy to the regime’s track
record of erratic behaviors. As one ordinary citizen thus describes,

51
We have seen them all. One minute, the Party seems to relax its political control. Once
you let down your guard, they come out to get you. They’ve played this trick for years.
The Communist leaders change their face like the April weather. Living with the fear
of persecution made us jaded and overcautious.
84

However changeable the official policy is, it has rarely allowed the citizenry to be far
from its influence -- the ordinary folks are frequently summoned to be in line with the
dominant political ethos. Localized political education and mobilization – also part of the
mechanism to keep everyone “on the same page” – is executed through the so-called
“work units” (state owned and private companies) which organize and oversee regular
“political study sessions” for all employees.
85
On a national level, over the past six
decades the Chinese public life has been characterized by rounds of top-down mass
mobilizations urging people to be “politically sensitive” and “catch onto the dominant
historical trend.” Whatever that trend is, be it to “topple the cow demons and snake
monsters,” to “annihilate capitalism-roaders” or to “get rich quick,” the cost of active
political involvement could be disastrous.
86
Mao was a master of mass campaigns,
fanning up political fervor and zealotry bordering on madness engulfing the whole nation.
Those who did answer his call, those who came out at the spur of idealism and political
zeal, often wound up crushed or purged. In the Reform-era, Deng Xiaoping introduced
some liberal measures as means to authenticate his own legitimacy. Once his rule was
secure, however, the entire pattern started to repeat again. From the late 1970s to late
52
1980s, Deng was instrumental to ushering in liberalization movements as well as
responsible for their shut-downs. Under his auspice, the tension between social liberation
and political control finally culminated in the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989.

Since CCP’s ascension to power in the late 1940s, through the grueling Anti-Rightist
movement, the Big Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution debacle, the 1989 Tiananmen
suppression, the anti-Falun Gong campaign, etc., waves upon waves of state-sponsored
campaigns, or yundong, have been unleashed onto China’s political landscape,
punctuating the civic life with cyclical upheavals. The ordinary Chinese have learned to
see the interludes between campaigns as temporary respites until the next session comes
along. In the process, the only thing remaining constant is the strong will of the regime,
infiltrating down to the private corner of thoughts and lives.

Political fluctuation, being exhaustive and all-consuming, constitutes a de-facto
disciplinary praxis in and of itself, inculcating fear and cynicism into the general public
not just for “taking the wrong side” but for taking any stance at all. Exemplifying this
fear is the notorious vagueness of Chinese petty bureaucrats reluctant to give a clear-cut
answer to requests or proposals from below—a self-protecting strategy that is. As Perry
Link observes, to the extent that a deliberate margin of ambiguity is necessary to survive
the system, some of these low-level cadres have spent their entire life cultivating the
mastery of a verbal gymnastic to never get on the wrong side of politics. Self-protection
53
is a disease infecting the Chinese citizenry at large. As Link remarks, “If most Chinese
can’t know where the border lies between safety and punishment, at least they know that
the farther they are from it, the safer they will be.”
87

The cost of political involvement has a chilling effect on the Chinese mind and body.
Unless for those seeking political advancement, the ordinary Chinese tend to view
China’s politics as self-serving shows for the powerful elites, which gives them all the
more a reason to keep to their private life. It is a genuine belief among the Chinese
citizens that one can stay “apolitical” by playing meek and focusing on her own business.
While “staying out of politics” may sound ludicrous in the Western context (for
everything is always already politicized), it is a mantra every Chinese parent endeavors to
press home for her children. Despite the fact that the state’s tentacles have directly
penetrated into the private domain in regulating pregnancy (“one-child policy”) and
cultural tastes (“anti-Three Vulgars”), the dominant sensibility—made particularly salient
after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre---is that as long as the ordinary citizens keep off
certain explosive minefields, they should be fine and left unscathed to pursue individual
wealth and hedonistic fun. The notion of the “private, free, and relatively self-governing
individual” achieved through withdrawing from the public domain is individualism of a
Chinese bent.
88

54
“Politics” is a Negative Term Accusing the Challengers and Protecting the
Establishment

Last section addressed the fact that “politics” is viewed as a negative signifier deterring
political actions primarily due to historical precedents and policy shiftiness. The
Reform-era has introduced a different political dynamics which discouraged spontaneous
political engagement through manipulating the linguistic usage of “politics.”

The current Chinese leadership, or the Post-Tiananmen successors of Deng Xiaoping, is
considered a more conservative cohort than Deng. Politically, they have reversed some of
Deng’s reform gains and assumed a more heavy-handed stance.
89
Granted, the regime
has demonstrated an amazing flexibility in “jettisoning economically-related ideological
baggage” in being an unabashed champion of authoritarian capitalism,
90
but as
McGregor describes, it is still “Leninist in the core,” “secretive, corrupt, hostile to the
rule of law and vindictive in the pursuit of its enemies.” The Chinese communist Party
has rehashed its political goal to be “to stay in power and get rich at the same time, or to
stay in power by getting rich;” it has also renewed its pact with Chinese society by
offering the citizenry to either “play by our rules and get rich with us, or else.”
91

55
To prevent spontaneous political activities to spill into the formal officialdom, the
establishment has set out to control the socio-linguistic formation of the term “politics.”
The very term “politics,” or zhengzhi, when it appears in official rhetoric, is deliberately
placed in negative or confrontational contexts. The one fixed phrase where zhengzhi
makes its most frequent appearance is “gao zhengzhi”-- literally “to meddle in” or “mess
with politics.” “Meddlers” are either described as futile regime challengers risking the
safety of self and family or clumsy, end-of-rope figures, losers of the economic blessings
befalling others, and hence frequently labeled as “wreckers of societal harmony” and
“saboteurs of good life.”
92
In the official discourses, activists are increasingly watered
down from being viewed as real enemies with an agenda to those envious of the more
successful and lucky ones – they are rebels without a real cause. Just like this, agents of
change are either vilified or dismissed as nuisances not worth a fight.

With ground-up political actions discredited or defamed, oddly enough, the formal
political measures and policies originated by the state are exempt from being dragged
down by the polluting effect of “politics.” Official politics is still the main driving force
in social life, impacting all social sectors through direct control or indirect politicization.
Yet the ability of the Party which “has positioned itself like a political panopticon” allows
itself “to keep an eye on any state or non-state agency, while shielding itself from view at
the same time.”
93
The government sees no necessity to mark its actions as “political” –
they are simply “policies, rules, and regulations,” with the “political” label and its
56
negative connotation dispensed with once and for all. To the extent that the government
is omnipresent and all-seeing, its actions and initiatives become invisible and unmarked.
94

95

The withdrawal of political labeling from “legitimate” (official) politicking and the
saliency of “politics” as a derogatory mark slapped on “illegitimate” political actions
have resulted in a double standard. Not burdened by the negative connotation of
“politics,” the government actions do not have to account for themselves in that regard.
On the contrary, the onus is on political protests and demonstrations. Through being
customarily linked with trouble and risk, “politics” and “being political” are cast in an
unsavory and accusatory light. Not only are people weary of direct political participation
for fear of future reprisal, they are also suspicious of political engagement in general.
Activism is no longer held in high regard as it used to be before Tiananmen. The ordinary
Chinese often speak disapprovingly of “dissidents” and “activists” by calling them
“trouble-makers” or “losers” not being able to fend for themselves, who want to gain at
others’ expense. The greatly increased opportunities to pursue individual wealth, bundled
with self-preservation motive and isolationist sentiments, have resulted in a widespread
political apathy and antipathy that works in the favor of the establishment by further
conceding the political grounds to the hegemonic power.
96

57
The Praetorian Public Sphere and Nominally “Apolitical” Activities

The tendency to withdraw from formal political realms has not left the public forum
vacant; instead, it has resulted in what David Lynch calls a “praetorian public sphere,” a
space delimited by attempted yet less than effective “state control over thought and key
communication content” on the one hand and unbridled inundations of apolitical
chattering on the other.
97

The praetorian public sphere was founded on a space vacated by the intelligentsia (the
opinion leaders) with their serious political talks. Scholars have noted that a tradition
fundamental to the identity of the Chinese intelligentsia is to worry for “the people and
the nation,” to see their calling as “taking responsibilities for all under heaven” and to
argue the big questions confronting the fate of China.
98
According to Tu Weiming, this
preoccupation with big questions and meta-narratives is a legacy of the Confucian
scholar-official system which, for the past 2000 years, established the Chinese
intelligentsia as public intellectuals to be directly incorporated into the bureaucratic
system and function as moral paragons for the local and national community.
99
This
tradition experienced a disruption in the aborted 1989 Tiananmen pro-democratic
movement. Since then “the backbone of Chinese intelligentsia was broken,” leaving some
tongue-tied, marginalized and resentful, some cynical and trivial, and some utterly bought
off. With the formal political sphere all but closed off and meta-narrative not in vogue, a
58
consortium of factors -- the top-down encouragement of economic pursuit, administrative
fragmentation, the splintering of social life, technological advances, etc. – have
contributed to the unleash of a strong influx of energy and desires. This multi-colored
chattering, ostensibly and sometimes deliberately apolitical, flooded the public domain
with “excessive sex, violence…meretricious entertainment” and other popular cultural
forms in lieu of serious political dialogues.
100
While some critics bluntly expressed
disappointment over the post-Tiananmen generation for recanting their calling as public
intellectuals, others see in this chaotic mumbo-jumbo a further loss of control by the state
which cannot hold their line of defense even if it tries. One can argue that this
transmutation of political energy into a seemingly non-political form is in and of itself an
understated political statement, which, in Gramsci’s words, “diffuses (the official)
ideological models and systems of attitudes that bear on the lived relationships of men
and women to their world.”
101
This disorderly vibrancy also puts some of the Party elites
on alert: the elite Party journal Qiushi once publicized an editorial in 1996 cautioning
against the corrosive effect of “apparently harmless Western cultural forms” to CCP’s
ideological core.
102

It is against this backdrop -- the erosion of the Party’s “thought work,” the departure of
serious political discussion, and the influx into the public sphere of everything else -- that
the post-Tiananmen era has seen the birth of a sleuth of “apolitical” activities and trends.
It is also the context in which Qigong and Falun Gong rises and flourishes as
59
semi-private, semi-public cultural, therapeutic and sports movements. While it is true that
explicitly anti-regime messages are forbidden to circulate, the praetorian public sphere
opens up an elbow space to smuggle in coded political thoughts. The core concerns,
unlike those raised by the Tiananmen activists, are no longer with regime change or
fundamental political reform; instead, people rally behind local justice, equality and the
improvement of livelihood of the common folks.

The Chinese system has been long described as a marriage of paternalistic
Confucianism and Leninism which results in an aggrandized notion of “authority.”
Calling the Chinese system the “worst of both,” Tu Weiming, a Harvard scholar of China
studies, argues that “The confluence of Confucian feudalism -- with too much emphasis
on the group and authority-- and the Stalinistic notion of dictatorship, these two forces
constitute the brutality of the Chinese regime.”
103
According to Princeton’s Lucian Pye,
however, even though an exaggerated notion of authority and propriety permeates the
Chinese body politic, straightjacket control on dissent also generates feigned compliance
and resistance of ingenious means.
104
Indeed, as Pye has noted, “conformity and
rebellion have become the lifeblood of modern Chinese politics.”
105
Pye’s thesis has
helped frame the political culture Falun Gong is grounded in.

60
The Tripartite Religious Terrain: Religion, Science and Superstition

In this section I propose a structural perspective to study China’s religious landscape
premised on three intrinsically connected terms, i.e. “religion,” “science” and
“superstition.” They refer to adjacent or contrasting domains with semantics parsed out
relative to each other. I believe that analyzing them as an inseparable trio bound up in
China’s political and historical specificities will help provide a preliminary answer to
Qigong’s constant (re-)negotiation and (re-)positioning vis-à-vis these three terms.

The socio-linguistic context in which “religion” exists can be revealed in a casual
question. As Fenggang Yang suggests, any Chinese school children, upon being asked
about the meaning of “religion,” would readily answer that “religion is the opium of the
people; only the oppressed and the weak would resort to superstitious religious beliefs.”
Chinese students are taught to arm themselves with “a scientific outlook,” states Yang,
because it is widely “believed that only science and technology” and, to a certain extent,
Marxism, “would make society progress toward the future.”
106
What is revealed in the
statement above is a Marxism and scientism-tinged, secularized understanding of religion.
Religion thus construed has little to offer morally or existentially; it does not concern
individual experiences but has everything to do with how a society as well as a
modernizing state should historically orient itself – progress or stagnation, feudalism or
modernity, future or past.
107
This “social progressive rhetoric” shall frame much of the
61
following analysis on religion. And like many aspects of Chinese life, this understanding
is by and large due to the intervention of the Chinese state.

Science, the Savior of China

“Science” (scientism) is viewed as a “God-term” in China’s cultural life, the term
holding “primary motivation potency” and “preeminent ranking,” the benchmark the
other terms are evaluated against.
108
Its prestige stems from two related trends: first, the
competition between religion and secularism which is an outgrowth of enlightenment
mentality (this trend impacts the whole world), and second, a regime so eager to
modernize and so invested in the political correctness of rationality and progress that a
state-sponsored atheism is widely practiced to secure the cultural and political
predominance of science. Science marks an ethos, an ideology, and an object to be
idolized. This “science worship” can be illuminated in light of the historical situation in
which it was introduced from the West.

The Chinese romance with Science (with a capital “s”) and, by extension, modernity,
got off to a bumpy and traumatic start. The putatively permanent rule of the Middle
Kingdom was shattered in the late 19
th
century when science – its effect writ large in
warships and guns – proclaimed its entrance along with the colonizing Western forces.
Having witnessed the impressive power of science and technology, soon, the educated
62
Chinese elites looked upon science as the new agent of national salvation and instrument
of modernization. Science was then (and still is) lauded as the veritable panacea for
China’s problems, promising instrumental prowess, material prosperity, individual
autonomy, hygienic lifestyle, and healthy families – all that was good, new, advanced,
and modern.

Science was soon put to reengineering Chinese society. In the first half of the 20
th

century, Chinese intellectuals and business elites rallied behind science as an institution
of thought and practice with emotional intensity.
109
Entrepreneurs ran factories guided
by a “modern, hygienic, and scientific” sensibility. A representative of them, Song
Feiqing, devoted himself to building “a modern, progressive and scientific business
enterprise.” To achieve his goal, he sealed his factory off from the chaos on the streets
while adopting an extreme version of procedural rationality (Henry Ford’s rational
factory model) whereby “there was a defined form for virtually everything” and
everything had to be measured and counted.
110
New Life Movement in the 1930s
championed “science” as a motto for desirable “new life styles.” For example,
wool-knitting and wearing, a trend imported from the West, was promoted by New Life
advocates to be “a form of scientific and hygienic clothing.” Accordingly, the urban new
women must learn wool-knitting to “scientifically” manage a family that is “modern” and
“patriotic.”
111
Overall, science and technology were regarded as patriotic defenses
against the ills plaguing Chinese society and failure to commit to them amounted to
63
leaving China in the clutches of warlord predation, poverty and imperialism. Science was
heavily enshrined in salvational rhetoric as the telos the whole society was supposed to be
bound for.

Since the communist take-over in 1949, the status of science was taken to a new high,
its symbolic cachet exaggerated out of proportion, serving seemingly unlikely political
purposes in odd instances. Mao advocated for the scientific absolutism of Marxism. That
is to say, “Marxism” is synonymous with “science,” its truth status legitimated through
being science, and in theoretical exchangeability with science. Empowered by Marxism a
la Science, Mao the master Marxist was credited with developing a theory of elementary
particles supposedly more “scientific” than quantum mechanics.
112
Science as an abstract
icon extended into areas that would not ordinarily be associated with scientific inquiries.
During the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party engaged in serious
discussions of devising a “scientific taxonomy for class enemies.” One Party journal
lamented that “young people (Red Guards) … had only limited knowledge of what the
state regarded as scientific formulations” of class wars. A “proper scientific measure”
was in dire need to classify political foes from friends.” Failing that, Mao cautioned,
“imprecise names” and “vague concepts” would occur, jeopardizing the socialist cause.
113

This demand for “scientific formulation” in political warfare endured until well after the
Cultural Revolution. While criticizing the Gang of Four, a People’s Daily article stressed
that “(linguistic) formulations are very serious matters that must be resolved
64
scientifically…Where the formulation is off the mark by one millimeter, the theory will
be wrong by a thousand kilometers.”
114
The official rhetoric was in the habit of invoking
“science” and “Marxism” at once when trying to gauge the correctness of one act. As
Mao’s personal cult was gathering momentum in the 1960s, in response to a nation-wide
call to intensely study Marxism, an ordinary soldier put forth a proposition to “take Mao
Zedong’s thoughts as the key link when studying Marxism-Leninism.” The young man’s
remarks were refuted by the then Beijing mayor Peng Zhen on the ground that it was
“unscientific” -- a view concurred by Mao’s one-time-successor, Lin Biao, who argued
that the claim was not “Chinese Communist Party’s scientific language” because it could
not be corroborated by “orthodox Marxism.”
115
The circulatory logic equating scientism
and Marxism (“something is scientific because it is soundly measured against Marxism
and by the same token, something is orthodoxically Marxist because it is scientific”) can
also be found in one instance documented by Michael Shoenhals:

In 1986 a handbook for Party propagandists explained that 'Time is money'...is a
scientific slogan, and a tenable one, because it is in keeping with Marxist tenets
concerning the value of labor.’ The slogan ‘Work away like there's no tomorrow; have
fun until you drop dead’ (warming degan, pinming dewar), in contrast, was judged to
be unscientific. First put forward by the Communist Youth league in 1984 to
characterize the spirit of the 1980s but later withdrawn, it had the de facto effect of
‘promoting recklessness and misconduct.’
116

65
Apparently, the overuse and abuse of “science” in Chinese political rhetoric seems
inconceivable and even preposterous to outsiders. However, for those moving within the
Chinese political milieu, whether or not having “science” on one’s side – which often entails
hefty theorization and minute hair splitting – is a serious matter. Well into the first decade of
the 21
st
century, this “science” rhetoric is still very much alive in public life. China’s street
vendors peddle books on “scientific” fortune-telling

and the Party elites are always clamoring
for “scientific Party management.”
117
Although “science,” according to Richard Weaver, is
also an idolized God-term in the West on account of its linkage with “fact,” empirical
investigation,” and “truth,”
118

never has science been directly implicated in the raison d'être
of a political regime as in the case of China.

In a speech delivered on Chinese New Year’s Eve
in 2005 to all ethnic Chinese worldwide, China’s president and Party Secretary Hu Jintao
justified the Party’s legitimacy on a “scientifically irrefutable” basis and its adherence to “a
scientific understanding of societal development.”
119
However confusing and misleading the
political jargons are, the symbolic power of science is not to be mistaken. To summarize, as
part of China’s standardized political formulation, “science” is a glorious label of utility,
efficiency, progress and infallibility, a veritable ideograph political rivals vie for in public
debates. “Science is what appears to work,” asserts Michael Shoenhals,
120
its symbolic
authority having gone beyond mere epistemic prestige in commanding real and primary
material resources.

66
One thorny issue remains as part of the historical baggage left by science’s discursive
formation. Since the importation of science as the new hegemonic icon was implicated in
the humiliating challenge to China’s political and cultural authority in the colonial era, a
heated debate soon followed in the early part of the 20
th
century as to how to reconcile
science with authentic Chinese-ness: To what extent can science be made Chinese? How
to reconcile science’s Western origin and its Chinese instantiation? Some scholars
suggested treating science as a maid to a master, a mere instrument to a lofty end which is
Chinese culture; others argued for a complete overhaul of everything traditionally
Chinese.
121
What was called Chinese heritage was nothing but impediment to progress
and modernization, the second group contended. Whatever the outcome of this science vs.
tradition debate (it is agreed that the second group has won by and large), uncritical
acceptance of scientism and negation of traditional Chinese teachings, rituals, and
institutions have stayed on as a touchy subject for the Chinese intelligentsia who query
China’s role in a world defined by science. That was why, when Qigong – “the gem of
Chinese culture” -- came along, considered at the same time to be on the frontier of
“human body science,” it was hailed as a potential answer to this age-old dilemma.

Religion, a Neutral Term

Much has been written about the neutral and circumscribed existence of “religion” in
China – a relatively safe one at that.
122
The official recognition of “religion” is the
67
outcome of compromise between a repressive state ideology viewing religion as “false
consciousness” and religion’s irrepressible vitality. Mao launched iconoclastic campaigns
which targeted all religions and had temples toppled and the clergy disbanded. After him,
the administration under Deng Xiaoping, out of practical concerns, restored partial
legitimacy to religion. “Religion” in the Chinese context henceforth refers to five
mainline religions only -- Christianity, Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism, and Taoism, with
strings attached. First, they need to adhere to the separation between the public and the
private by operating in the private only, worshiping in designated venues and refraining
from public proselytizing. Second, they are to be reigned in by state power by registering
with monitoring state agencies, embracing socialist leadership and state-approved
religious leaders, and staying “patriotic” through, for instance, cutting ties with foreign
religious leaders such as the Pope and the Dalai Lama.
123
Meeting these requirements,
the five mainline religions, along with quasi and semi-religious systems such as
communism and scientism, are safely lodged in the legal, “red” market of religion.
124

There is a vast area of religious beliefs, believers, activities and organizations outside
this officially approved “red market.” Being non-official means that they are either part
of the directly illegal (officially banned) “black market” as “superstitions,” or simply of
ambiguous legal status, in the grey zone.
125
Qigong, Falun Gong, and a host of other
local, popular, folk faiths and practices have once (some still do) made their home in the
grey area. Being “un-recognized” has its upside and downside. It means they are not
68
subject to the restriction applicable to recognized religions and therefore allowed the
freedom to preach publicly, which is not available to officially approved religions. For a
time, wearing many hats such as cultural societies, self-healing movements, alternative
therapies, sports, and human body science, these folk and popular faiths and practices
thrived in this symbolic and institutional limbo. In the meantime, having never acquired
the “religion” label means that they are not entitled to the same rights and protection. A
self “mis-recognition” has thus arisen whereby followers of non-official religions can
barely see beyond the state discourse. As David Ownby writes:

It would never have occurred to a victim of this discrimination to demand that his
“freedom of religion” be respected, because “religion” had been defined in such as way
as to exclude his spiritual practice. Even now, if you approach worshipers at a popular
shrine in China and ask them if they are happy to be able to practice their “religion,”
they will stare at you blankly, because the word itself continues to have no meaning
other than that imposed by the state.
126

So as far as China’s representational politics goes, despite the controversy it once
stoked (under Mao) and the current distain it still receives from a scientism-driven culture,
“religion” is a neutral term, once discussed and now settled. Marxism might still poke at
it on a theoretical plane but would leave it be as an established institution.
“Superstition,” on the contrary, bears the brunt of political ire; it is the implied “other” of
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“Science” and what “Science” sets out to quench, for “superstition” is not only
“unscientific,” but “un-Chinese,” or against what a modern and progressive China is
supposed to be.

Superstition, a Stigma

In the spectrum comprised by religion, science and superstition, “superstition” is low,
bastardly and dirty, the antithesis of science and modernity, something always to be
mobilized against, negated, and overcome.
127

The history of “superstition” as a notion dates back to pre-modern times. Historically,
orthodox religions invariably reserved a place for religious practices and beliefs regarded
as improper, excessive, heretic, or false, and labeled them “superstition.” The advent of
modernity compounded that dynamic by introducing a new benchmark, i.e.
enlightenment rationality, which measures the “progressiveness” of theistic systems
based on their “modifiability.” Hence, the “civilized” theistic systems were grouped into
what we conventionally take to be “religion,” driving “superstition” further into the
ideational heathen land. The distinction between religion and superstition is now taken as
a given. “Religion,” as Feuchtwang puts it, “has a universal and agnostic sense…stands
somewhere between ‘superstition’ and social, natural, and scientific truth,”
128
whereas
“superstition” denotes irrational and half beliefs, belonging to the area of charlatanry and
70
ignorance, a case of, in the words of Mary O’Neil, “bad religion” as well as “bad
science.”
129

In the late 19
th
century and early 20
th
century, a trend happening at more or less the
same time to such countries as Korea, India, Japan and Sri Lanka.
130
Under the pressure
of modernization, these pre-modern societies imported a host of concepts from the West
to understand their past, present and the future. There was an acute awareness that their
ancient civilization was in its twilight years, and “superstition” – encompassing a broad
range of cultural practices, religious beliefs, and social institutions – was to be blamed for
the falling from grace of their once glorious cultures. Take China for example. In the
early 20
th
century when the republican government attempted to reform religion and
eradicate “backward” practices, they introduced “concept and vocabulary of religion
predicated on faith rather than ritual, a notion that sat uneasily in a spiritual environment
based as much in eclecticism and praxis as in ideal.”
131
The urban elites made an
example of themselves by discarding membership in folk faiths and practices and
embracing instead mainline faiths such as Buddhism or better yet, Christianity, the icon
of “progressive religion.” Through “New Village Movement” (in Korea) and “New
Culture Movement” (in China), the modernizing imperative in the first half of the 20
th

century effected an official split between “religion” and “superstition” with the help of
state apparatuses. These social engineering projects with respect to religion paralleled
what Michele de Certeau’s says about superstition: “What was not transportable, or not
71
yet transported, into the new areas of progress appeared as ‘superstition.’”
132
The
religious landscape thus cleaned up in these societies mirrored that of contemporary
Western societies.

Superstition’s negative baggage stayed on as China entered its socialist era which
further enforced a Manichean battle of either (Marxism) or (superstition). Mao’s extreme
anti-religious policy expanded to include all mainline beliefs as his target of elimination.
What had once been considered modernized and mature religions such as Buddhism and
Christianity fell in Mao’s anti-superstition crusade, too. In the aftermath of Mao, after the
reinstatement of officially approved religions (five of them), the distinction between
“religion” and “superstition” remains, and is enforced by the official viewpoint.

Now I want to suggest that “superstition” is a negative term par excellence and as such
a floating signifier of uncertain referents (the only thing certain about “superstition” is
that it is always something to be mobilized against). At times it could refer to activities
such as building shrines at home and performing tricks of divination, at others it could
refer to attending temple fairs and celebrating holidays involving rituals of worship. It is
for a reason that the line of what is officially considered “superstitious” has been drawn
and redrawn. To borrow McGee’s observation on ideograph, a construct of “high order
abstraction represent[s] commitment to a particular but equivocal and ill-defined
normative goal.”
133
By invoking an indefinite concept perceived to have a
72
conventionally assumed significance, rhetors can play the embedded uncertainty to their
own advantage. “Superstition” in its vagueness can therefore be conveniently grafted
onto a host of indefinite but “unpleasant” activities per dominant political will. The way
the Chinese state has been employing “superstition” to incriminate what it considers to be
subversive groups has led Feuchtwang to claim that “superstition” (and “cult,” too) exists
above all as an “imperial metaphor of China” than a self-sufficient entity of
clearly-defined substance.
134

In most cases, “superstition” is chastised to reflect an atheistic commitment to science,
sometimes a vulgarized version of science.
135
Mao’s “communist youths and cadres” used to
be sent to the country to tackle superstitious ignorance with “scientific knowledge.” At times,
the anxiety to appear “modern” and “scientific” takes on a facetious look. The official
Guangming Daily in 1982 offers a media report as follows:

One (political cartoon) is a drawing of peasants gathered in the yard in front of an open
temple. Inside, on the altar stands a television set where the figures of gods would have
been. The drawing is captioned “Buddha Abdicated, Television Enthroned.”
136

73
The cartoon has no intention of being sarcastic but was meant to be taken seriously as part
of a broader campaign to curtail “superstition” and replace it with “progressive” and
“scientific” activities. “Science” in this story is reduced to its cheap embodiment -- a TV set,
in the simplistic hope that a gadget would prove to be more attractive a diversion than a deity.

Alternatively, the correctional agent of “superstition” might be Marxism or “revolutionary
ethos.” The Qingming Festival has long been a day to tend the graves of the dead, which
involves sacrificial rites such as burning paper money for the deceased. As it happened,
deeming paper-money burning a “superstitious activity,” some municipal governments in the
1980s transformed the tomb-sweeping day into an occasion to sing commemorative songs to
the “revolutionary martyrs and heroes” buried at the same cemetery. Although looking
heartless in the eyes of some, the government explained that their motive was to make
Qingming Festival ritualistically “civilized and progressive,” coupled with a genuine disbelief
in an “afterworld needing paper money.”
137

What is already sanctioned as “legitimate” religions also risks lapsing into “superstition.”
When it happens, the political will to control embedded in the empty “superstitious” label is
most pronounced. Pastors who venture out to proselytize in public risk being labeled
“superstitious;” if they preach in their own venue yet on “forbidden topics,” they are engaged
74
in “superstitious activities;” worshiping in unregistered Christian church is considered
“superstitious,” or even “cult-ish.”
138
In 2002, when a Hong Kong businessman smuggled
over 33,000 Bibles into China for an underground church, what awaited him was 2 year jail
term and an indictment centered on “abetting a cult” -- the kind of allegation customarily
befalling Falun Gong.

His sentencing sparked an outcry where people sarcastically quipped
that “the Bible is a bad book in China.”
139
His case suggests that it is not the Christian belief
that is at fault but the “transgressive behavior” in assisting an underground organization that is
not tolerated. Although the “cult” charge always gives the appearance that what is being
targeted is the particular religion’s doctrinal flaws, as a matter of fact what is being
incriminated is the kind of behaviors resistant to control.

The distinction between officially recognized “religion” and “superstition” and how
“religion” might “slip” and “fall from grace” is well-explained in a policy briefing by the
Governor of Fujian Province. From a political control perspective, he states that superstition
refers to those using religion to “interfere with politics,” specifically “using religion to
‘sabotage’ socialism and the unity of the PRC.” In his words, “the legitimate religions must
support the communist leadership and the socialist system… have a legitimate organization
which is recognized by government departments concerned and accept their leadership; (their)
activities must be carried out within the scope permitted by the law and they must not affect
production and the social order. What is not the above, what exceeds this boundary, is
75
superstition.”
140
His clarifications have made it abundantly clear that the current regime in
China is concerned not so much with ideational nuances embedded in a particular faith as with
the social, legal and political ramifications thereof.

“Jiao” before Reification

The previous sections seek to illuminate the contemporary religious landscape
predominately carved by the hand of the Chinese state. It is also necessary to briefly
address the space occupied by the so-called “Jiao,” or historical teachings and traditions
bearing some resemblance to “religion” in the West. As systems of knowledge and praxis,
they are characterized by unclear boundaries, unstable existence, and
de-compartmentalized approaches – a literal hodge-podge from which such
institutionalized religions as Taoism and Buddhism were extracted and codified into
distinct beings, an indefinitive space still inhabited by a number popular faiths and folk
practices many of which claim an existence barely above the community level.

A cultural comparative angle is needed here. To understand the historical formation of
these traditions, we must first reference the Western conceptualization of religion.

76
Scholars have agreed that one of the most noticeable characteristics of Western,
Abrahamic religions (Christianity and Islam) is that they have a historical
self-understanding predicated on a distinct and “boundaried” notion of identity. This
identity enforces the dichotomy of the sacred and the profane;
141
it stresses an exclusive
and homogenous membership whereby one individual (sometimes one nation) subscribes
to one religion only; most importantly, Western religions are distinguished by a creedal
emphasis (“people of the book”) where organized doctrinal system reflects “the desire to
pin things down as affirmations of belief” and one’s religious identity is defined by
embracing a set of “religious propositions about God, Jesus, and the world.”
142
Western
religion’s doctrinal orientation has led it to be primarily embodied in “a system of
symbols,” housed in private consciousness, and involves first and foremost formulations
and “conceptions of a general order of existence.”
143

Scholars also argue that the modality of Western religions – sacred versus secular,
exclusive membership, doctrinal emphasis and private consciousness – is the “product of
historical processes,” the result of reification which took place in the post-Enlightenment
era.
144
To analyze the formation of religion as a historical phenomenon, the emphasis
should be on the “power” (as in “power/knowledge”) and social conditions which
affected Western religions’ modus operandi. Some scholars contend that the rise of
secular power helped “border up” the semantic and social realm of religion which then
acquired a distinct “essence” as being primarily about systems of thought, consciousness
77
and beliefs, leaving the public life under the purview of the state.

Mentioning reification helps direct attention to similar historical processes whereby
“indigenous thoughts and wisdoms of the Orient” – designators before the advent of
“religion” -- were separated, grouped and classified into “isms” along the lines of
contemporary Western religious norms. In the early part of the 20
th
century, the
modernization imperative led to social transformation which split “faith” from “rituals
and practices.”
145
The notion of reification also helps reveal an earlier state of affair
which presented a kind of dynamic anarchy where a myriad of epistemes, technes, and
praxes co-existed in an undemarcated whole. “Jiao,” religion’s previous incarnation in
China’s dynastic era, is the umbrella term housing miscellaneous things. It could refer to
elite traditions boasting sophisticated textual systems or folk praxis only concerned with
rituals and rites. It included secluded monastery pursuits where monks devoted
themselves to the obtainment of “ultimate relief,” “enlightenment,” and “transfiguration,”
or the more “diffused” worships embedded in a clan (ancestral veneration), a guild (guild
deity worship), and a civil polity (emperor-led high rituals).
146
Confucianism, the
hegemonic Jiao ruling China for four thousand years, was unabashedly practical-minded,
caring little for “transcendence” or “salvation,” but bent on organizing the secular life
with stipulated political and moral protocols.
147
Taoist monks were encyclopedic in
their approaches to knowledge, relying heavily on bodily cultivation, while venturing into
and seeking to integrate math, chemistry, astrology, medicine, philosophy, body politic
78
and such practical crafts as fengshui and fortune-telling in their comprehensive
cosmology. Indeed, just as the preeminent historian on Chinese science Joseph Needham
suggests, Jiao are composite knowledge forms having various epistemic implications.
148
149
Summarizing Jiao could be an academic headache as the miscellaneous bunch
involved does not bode well for neat classification or generalization in view of their
respective theological assumptions, structural configurations and resultant social utility.
They were not as analytically identifiable as their western counterparts, lacking, in
Asad’s words, an “autonomous essence -- not to be confused with that of science, or
politics, or common sense.”
150
In time, this cultural non-compartmentalization was to
become an important resource for revivalist movements to draw on. In recent years,
attempts have been made to revisit these ancient traditions with the hope of gaining
inspirations from an integrated approach to reality. Likewise, Qigong and Falun Gong
have tapped into this hybrid cultural space shared by transcendent pursuits, civic
engagement, science and corporeal practices, and have made claims of composite nature.

Conclusion

The goal of this section is to illuminate the contemporary religious landscape comprised
of three related and contrasting constructs --- “science,” “religion,” and “superstition,” and to
79
illustrate their respective meanings and mobilization potency. I argued that the political ethos
is such that “science” is worshiped as a God-term, against which “religion,” a neutral term,
and “superstition” – a castigating charge arising out of modernity’s negative commentary on
theism -- are measured. This clarification explains why Qigong and Falun Gong unwilling
(and unable) to proclaim itself “religion,” but, despite their religious overtone, competed for
the prestige of “science.” Unfortunately, the shift in political winds eventually pushed Qigong
and Falun Gong into the camp of “superstition.”

This section also sheds light on the interconnection of the topoi: political forces dominate
and mold religious formation; religious could be transcendental and “deserting” of family and
secular life, or embedded in a family-like (tribe, clan, nation) entities as civil religion; and
“health” is incorporated into some (oriental) religious experiences characterized by an
interpenetration of spirituality and corporeality.

Family

Family exists as a space, a site, a structure of social relations, a moral imperative, a
symbolic construct founded on presumed homogeneity and purity, and an organizing
hierarchy of identification and worth. It first and foremost delineates a bounded and
80
private place, distinct from the rest, protected from without, integral to one’s lifeworld
and permeated with sentiments, affects, obligations and bonds. Extending from one’s
immediate family to tribe, village, church, city and nation, the notion of family
encompasses a community, a polis, a Heimat, a sanctuary sustained by one’s longing for
reprieve and sustenance. Family is also the social platform where a number of
phenomena and activities – matrimony, patrimony, maternity, paternity, reproduction,
growth, love, nurturing, discipline, etc. –take place. Legally, the notion of family
warrants territorial and proprietary claims.

Being a powerful and ubiquitous metaphor since time immemorial, the fact that
“family” is culturally entrenched in our immediate reality makes it naturally aligned with
politics, religion and health. For instance, a nation has been likened to a family which has
“patriarchs” and “big brothers.” Political and moral campaigns have been mounted from
the subject position of concerned family members, most notably, the mother, as in
“mothers against guns,” “mothers against drunk driving,” and “powerful black mama.” In
his 1996 book accounting for the deep-seated political schisms in the US, linguist George
Lakoff compares conservative ethos to that of a “strict father” and liberal to that of a
“nurturing mother.”
151
Family analogies can be amply found in religious imageries
where God is “our father in heaven” and the church “the bride of Christ.”
152
Family is as
much a safe haven as a battleground, a place under constant attack from alien intruders
and a fortress against chaos and anomalies.
153
As such, family shares a natural
81
connection with the topos of health, both representing a normative urge to order, to
maintain, and to improve.

Family can be seen as a quintessential ideograph whose rhetorical authority is
universally recognized and invoked to compel moral actions. Wars are fought to protect
the integrity of family and community; claims are staked to possess or repossess ancestral
lands. J.V. Jensen observes that employing the family metaphor can occasionally “narrow
the vision and lessen the option,” driving the interlocutors into hardened positions.
154

Similarly, Tonn et al assert that obsession with communal traditions and inherited
territories often results in blaming the “other” as provoking troubles and absolving
oneself of wrongdoings.
155
Critics caution against the unproductive “we-they”
dichotomy and the danger of excessive violence committed in the name of family.

The notion of family has played an important role in Chinese culture, spawning 1) a
family-based domestic polity, and 2) a civil religion that has little to do with theistic,
prophetic and revealed faith but is identified with a political culture and a secular
leadership. Both are embodied in Confucianism, known to some as China’s family-based
political philosophy as well family-oriented religion.

The Confucian system of patrimonialism ruled China for four thousand years; it
established its political, moral and religious order on the model of family. Familial ties
82
exemplified in the three bonds between superiors and inferiors (man over wife, parents
over children, and ruler over subject) have been elaborated into a kind of domestic polity
which assigns authority and value based on lineage and seniority.
156
It is also a deeply
humane system, translating the private network of “justice, mutual affection, obligation
and support” into the social realm.
157
Familial values affect China’s own brand of civil
religion in two important aspects. First, unlike in a sacral religion, a family-based civil
religion focuses on this life and this world which is supposedly best governed by seniors
and elders. Consequently, deceased ancestors were consecrated into semi-deities to
(continue to) partake in the governance and maintenance of community wellbeing. By the
same token, civil magistrates (emperors included) who are deemed as patriarchs or ersatz
fathers assume semi-priestly roles presiding over various communal rituals. Second, this
family orientation curtails and often clashes with otherworldly religions such as
Buddhism and Taoism, adding in their mix “worldly” elements like loyalty and filial duty.
The Confucian self is always embedded in layers of collectivities, defining his
subjectivity in terms of those around him, hardly a individual whose religious experience
is conditioned by “a lone self facing a transcendental God.” Writing on how
Confucianism is essentially at odds with transcendentalism, C.K. Yang states that it
“scorned any interest in an afterlife” and “regarded filial piety as the greatest of all
virtues.”
158
Family emphasis and “this-worldliness” hence becomes a point of
contention with the transcendental traditions, which has been the case since the earliest
days of Buddhism. When Sakyamuni walked among villages and collected his disciples,
83
“householders” hurtled unpleasantries at him for taking away sons and daughters and
breaking up families. “You cannot leave this family and become a monk just yet,”
protests Jia Baoyu’s father, “not until you have left me a grandson and restored the Jia
clan to its rightful place.”
159
In our heavily secularized modern world, attitudes toward
family have increasingly been seen as a touchstone to evaluate if a new religion is a
“cult.” Those that are “family-friendly” and “supportive of the established values” are
cast in a positive light, while those perceived to be “endangering the family” and
“subversive to the mainstream society” are decidedly “cultic.”
160

Now I will briefly discuss the mutation of Confucianism at the hands of Mao, morphing
into what scholars call “Leninist Confucianism,” the legacy of which can still be felt
today and greatly impacted the anti-Falun Gong strategies. When Mao’s “New China”
took over the old, he attacked Confucianism as “reactionary and feudalistic,” and in the
meantime, “drove a wedge into the sacred (family) relationships…as a litmus test for
loyalty to the socialist cause.”
161
What Mao did was in effect displacing familial piety,
emotional bonds and personal trust to an ideologically-motivated yet equally intense
loyalty of a soldier/son for his Fürher/father. He wound up creating a species of beings
defined by their political consciousness, who, as it happened, did not hesitate to turn
against their next of kin based on alleged political ‘impurities.’
162
Particular ties,
personal relationships and trust are discouraged in favor of abstract and impersonal
relations such as “comradeship.”
163
In remaking the family, Mao held in his grip a
84
mixture of sentiments including cult-like idolization, political loyalty and familial
devotion, with the great Helmsman himself embodying godhood, surrogate fatherhood,
indisputable political leadership and moral authority. Although Mao’s time is long gone,
a rupture within the fabric of Chinese family remains and threatens to burst ajar when the
state has its finger on it. The same weakness was indeed exploited in the anti-Falun Gong
campaign by the state posing as a surrogate parent, who again planted a wedge into the
sacred family relationships by turning families distrustful of each other.

Health

Health is of fundamental importance to all of us throughout our lives. Situated at the
confluence of biomedical and socio-historical processes, the multi-dimensionality of
health has given it a mercurial quality. In common parlance, health is narrowly defined as
the absence of disease. The traditional bio-medical model relies upon
scientifically-defined procedures and measures to evaluate health. Recent interests in a
more holistic approach demands a network model wherein health is regarded as the
degree of alignment between mind and body, self and family, self and community, self
and nature, self and cosmos and/or god. As health moves away from the narrow physical
definition toward a more humanistic conceptualization of “well-being”, it sheds light on
the importance of the “meaning” of health and takes on moral, social, and religious
significance. This section will mainly discuss the non-corporal, interpretive side of heath
85
in light of its connection with religion and politics.

Health and Religion

Religious scholar Wouter Hanegraaff states that religion and healing share a “natural
affinity” in that “both domains…share a concern with providing alternatives to human
weakness and sufferings.”
164
That is to say, functionally, both religion and health are
concerned with ways to address, alleviate, or simply explain away human sufferings.
Religion accomplishes the task, as Peter Berger puts it, through its endeavors to
“integrate” “anomy, chaos and death” into “the nomos of human life” by providing
“cosmic references” transcending the frailty of human conditions.
165
The health approach,
on the other hand, focuses on causes of naturalistic or humanistic roots. In pre-modern
times, religion and health remedy were more intertwined. Miraculous healings were
credited to the prowess of early church fathers – which are still performed today in some
initiation rituals and psycho-physical therapies. Diseases were explained through a
supernatural lens which viewed pestilence as divine punishment for human sins or the
doings of diabolic agents. Accordingly, exorcism and penitence were required as part of
the routine spiritual-medical procedures for the sick and invalid. In situation of epidemic
outbursts such as massive plaques, religious fervor might flare into
apocalyptically-themed movements. All these examples bespeak a richly layered
common space once shared by spirituality and health.
86
In recent years, reactions against the modernistic model of disease promote an
interpretive strain of thought which seeks to revisit the concept of health through
re-introducing religion into the picture. Scholars, medical anthropologists in particular,
question and challenge the dominance of western health science paradigm. They argue
that health cannot be exclusively understood in physical terms at the expense of other
confounding factors. Medical anthropologist Allan Young, for instance, distinguishes the
bio-medically defined concept of “disease” from the subjective notion of “illness,”
arguing that the latter refers to “a person’s perception and experiences of certain socially
disvalued states including, but not limited to, disease.”
166
Young’s distinction between
(curing) “disease” and (healing) “illness” is instrumental to broadening our understanding
of health and health care. Healing, it is suggested by medical anthropologists, should take
into account the whole person and “give attention to the interaction between physical,
emotional, mental and spiritual aspects of the patient’s experience, as well as to social
factors and the influence of the wider environment.”
167
In the same spirit, Arthur
Kleinman’s field work at a Chinese clinic underlines the importance of native categories
and a “culturally fit” explanation of illness.
168
The interpretive understanding of health
advises caregivers to be “cognizant of values and embeddedness in philosophies and
religions”
169
and locate diagnosis and treatment compatible with locally salient belief
systems and ways of life. A “meta-medical” framework is brought into focus where
ethnicity, nationalism, rapid social change, and social conflict are seen as either
“resonating with or being expressed through patterns of illness behavior.”
170
This holistic
87
reorientation of health frees health conceptualization from the straightjacket of
biomedicine, suggesting a more fluid transaction between mind and body, individual and
society, and human and nature.

What contributes to and stands to benefit from this broadened perspective on health
and healing are alternative, indigenous and ethnic medicine and their contemporary
Western cousins, i.e. New Religious Movements and New Age Healing Movements.
Admittedly, these alternative therapeutics, whether of ancient roots or part of a
postmodern cultural revivalist trend, are cross-breeds of science and magic, religion and
medicine. Riding on the newly found interests in these still “fringe” practices and
knowledge forms, subjects such as “Tibetan medicine: magic in science and science in
magic,” “shamanism and medicine,” “faith healing” and “voodoo healing” are valorized
as serious academic inquiries.
171
Scholars have agreed that indigenous and alternative
therapies have raised interesting questions regarding the impact of modernization,
cultural identity and embodied subjectivity. Religion’s health effects – in physical rather
than symbolic terms – are rapidly gaining traction within scientific communities as well
as among lay groups.

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Health as a Biopolitical Project

"Biopolitics" is a term coined by French social theorist Michel Foucault. It refers to
the disciplinary measures the modern nation states apply to their subjects through "an
explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies
and the control of populations."
172
Such regulatory mechanism is most saliently practiced
in relation to public health aimed at producing normal, productive and hygienic body
politic.

All states have moral, political, and economic stakes in cultivating a healthy body
politic of utility and efficiency. Integral to its modernization project, China’s central
leadership, soon after it assumed power, launched in the early 1950s a series of “national
patriotic hygiene campaigns” to remake the citizenry. The goal of such bio-political
engineering was to redress the so-called “Sick Man of Asia,” a much maligned image
evoking China’s tainted colonial past. The leadership then was promoting a notion that
"competent governance of the body's natural functions" was a "necessary condition for
competent government.”
173
Mao himself, out of utilitarian concern as well as because of
his romance with “mass movement,” coined the phrase: “to train the body for China.”
Literally he prescribed a host of Massensport routines to be practiced, for instance, every
morning at 7 am to the music of the nationally synched radio broadcast. Till this day, the
collective fitness regimen known as radio gymnastics still take place every morning at
89
urban squares and school yards in China. Mao’s legendary crossing of China’s Yangtze
River has been written into Party canons as a showcase of physical strength and a
definitive gesture toward “conquering and building a new world.” This tradition of
putting physical exercises to moral and political end has been carried on henceforth.
According to cultural anthropologist Susan Brownell, as China becomes more and more
status-conscious, the nationalistic fanfare over athletic achievement at high-profiled
global sports events is increasingly motivated by a sensibility that how well the athletes
do at international competitions reflects back on how well China fares as a nation on the
global stage.
174

China’s case also illustrates what Foucault calls the productive side of bio-power, that
is, the regulation and subjugation of the body goes hand in hand with the production and
formulation of a species of being. Foucault notes that in contrast to repressive measures
by ancien regime, modern nation states govern by “liberal” and “civil” means, that is, via
“knowledge” discourses and a myriad of “technologies of power” in the name of the
production and protection of life.
175
Regulation of hygiene, habits, reproductive practices,
and demographics is performed both for the nominal goal of social welfare and progress
and in service of creating productive and docile subjects. “The technologies of power”
are implemented through the mundane praxis on the body in places such as prisons,
schools, hospitals, militaries, etc. Inscribed in those spaces and guided by truth discourses
on human essence and potentiality, subjects participate in the objectification of
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themselves by internalizing such notions as “health,” “autonomy” and “industriousness.”
It is precisely by means of “self-governance” that the individual is appealed to and
invited into an alignment with the political objectives.

Read against the praxis of “biopolitics,” health represents a normalizing imperative
which seeks to turn pathology, deficiency and guilt into normalcy, perfection and
redemption. Having a profound effect in shaping selves and cementing institutional
authority, the transformative drive embedded in “health” can also be found in political
and religious undertakings, with “pollution”, “chaos”, “suffering”, “disorder”, and
“malfunction” on one end, and “redemption,” “order”, “wellbeing”, and “equilibrium” on
the other. Whether in top-down social reform or in self-willed spontaneous re-making,
the movement from the negative to the positive signifies a trajectory of discipline, care,
improvement, purification and transcendence. As such, health can be construed as an
umbrella term for transformational activities associated with politics (chaos-order),
religion (sin-salvation) and family (healing; purifying). The method to transform could
involve a tragic kill and purgation, or nurturing, care and love.
176

“Health” as a Ground-up Transformative Movement

Griffin writes that “to study a movement is to study a striving for salvation, a struggle
for perfection, a progress toward the ‘good’.”
177
In less abstract terms, sociologist
91
Hannigan holds that both social movement and New Religious Movements are mobilized
by the search for “meaning, identity, social support, love and empowerment.”
178

Naturally, ground-up health-inspired movements (distinct from top-down biopolitic
measures) represent an aspiration to progress physically, morally, politically and at times,
spiritually.

Historical movements with health or body building as explicit goals are invested with
self-empowering significance. An early example comes from the 18
th
century dietary
movement where regulated dieting was regarded as offering the blessings of health,
temperance, discipline and sobriety -- qualities coincidentally deemed desirable by both
the individual practitioner and the capitalist ethics alike.
179
In the late 19
th
century,
suffragettes such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton compared women’s
rights to exercise (cycling in particular) to their rights to vote. In light of newly acquired
outdoor mobility, freedom, and the less restraining dressing code required, Susan B.
Anthony in 1896 argued that bicycles were a revolutionary device that had “done more to
emancipate women than anything else in the world,” and represented the very “picture of
free, untrammeled womanhood."
180
In the late 1960s and 1970s, the body-centric
women’s health movement sought to redefine what health meant to women. To them,
women’s self-empowerment was linked to health issues such as access to contraceptives
and to the popular perception of women’s bodies in socio-medical terms.
Contemporaneous to the women’s health movement is the fitness movement of the 1970s.
92
Situated in an individualistic and consumerist context, the fitness movement summoned
the individual to wear a lean, fit and therefore marketable body – it became a
“full-fledged lifestyle” in the US, “a test of self-determination”, and an “act of
environmental symbiosis.”
181
In the communist context, GDR’s sports enthusiasts
wanted to push the boundary of state-imposed “legitimate” mass sports by deliberately
pursing activities labeled as politically “decadent,” “elitist,” “frivolous” and “bourgeois.”
From the forgoing examples, one can argue that health has the potential to serve as a
platform for self-realization, self-invention, and counter-hegemonic pursuits.
182

In contrast to individually-oriented fitness movement and body enhancement activities,
health pursuits in China speak a civilizational grammar not readily found in the West.
According to sociologist Kevin McDonald, “health practices and cultures are critical
markers of Chinese cultural identity” because “health is not a question of repairing the
body/machine but a way of” “knowing, acting and being in the world.”
183
Disease and
cure, harmony and balance, yin and yang - philosophical and medicinal constructs share
the same set of symbols; they are understood to be constitutive of the same set of criteria
gauging the wellbeing of individuals, society and nature in their connectedness. It seems
that the native Chinese explanatory model of illnesses and health facilitate a theory of
homeostasis linking the micro and macro realms in what Francis Hsu calls “concentric
circles” of the Chinese self. As such, as I am going to suggest in chapter 4, embodied
suffering and the remedy sought out in Qigong and Falun Gong are indicative of
93
perceived social illnesses and their solution impacting more than the individual body.
Health thus conceived becomes a metaphor allowing the individual to traverse from
personal experiences to social injustice; the abstract notion of societal health is lived and
experienced by individuals living and breathing in the world.

Conclusion

This chapter has conducted a survey of the polysemy of the four topoi which I have
argued constitute the terministic make-up of the Falun Gong movement. As symbolic
resources, they embody motives, warrant propositions, stir desires, appeal to the lived
experiences, and predispose the concerned discourse community toward certain positions
and behaviors. As pre-established parameters the participants are obligated to work with,
they do both good and bad things: they provide a grid of intelligibility which gives shape
to amorphous reality, but by so doing they might end up curtailing fluid experience into
static mold. In a way, people are both enabled and trapped by the symbolic resources
available to them. “Language speaks us as we speak it” rings very true.

This chapter also provides preliminary findings on the utility of the topoi which ranges
from sanctioning and reinforcing to negating and contaminating. Together they determine
how a movement should position itself vis-à-vis these socio-linguistic pillars. For
instance, the deterring effect of “politics” implies that it is discrete for a movement to not
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wear political aspirations on its sleeve but bury them in personal empowerment and
cultivation activities. Given the fact that “religion” only refers to five officially
sanctioned world faiths and given the derogatory connotation of “superstition,” for a
semi-religious practice to survive it has no recourse to “religion” as ground of
legitimacy, but should dodge the pollution of “superstition” while seeking affinity with
“cultural,” “sport” or “healing” activities, or simply reinvent themselves as “science”
(which Falun Gong did). Family (expandable to “community,” “polis,” or “mainstream
values”) is a holy term and not something to be violated. So for new religious movements
to survive, they need to stay within the family/community by being “family-friendly”
instead of treading outside or against it. Health has proven to be a constructive and
malleable concept housing physical, spiritual, moral, and political aspirations. The fact
that it is of universal resonance implies that agents of change under a stringent political
system can accomplish a lot by invoking the name of health. Next, in case studies from
chapter 3 to chapter 6, I will examine the exact topical formation as topoi are mobilized
by rhetors to address situational needs.

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Chapter Three
Legitimating Qigong through Health and Science

Last chapter addresses the polysemy of the four dominant topoi (health, religion, politics,
and family) with an eye toward their mobilization potentials. This chapter will apply last
chapter’s findings and use the four constructs to examine the first critical moment on Falun
Gong’s developmental trajectory – the birth and revival of Qigong of which Falun Gong is
one denomination. The rationale is that since the four topoi made up the symbolic milieu
of Qigong, Qigong had to contend with them to establish its legitimacy. I will employ the
notion of legimation strategy to trace Qigong’s difficult incorporation into the socialist
“New China” in the 1950s and its revival in the 1980s.

To gain legitimacy implies to work with or around the sanctioning terms. In Qigong’s
case it means that Qigong had to rely on the prestige of “health” and “science” and
distance itself from “superstition” in order to conform to the hegemonic ideology of
scientism and secularism. I will also illustrate that Qigong’s legitimation reflected the
socio-political contingencies and a distinct political drive which animated and maneuvered
the four terms in varying configurations. In the brief history of modern Qigong starting
from 1950s onward, Qigong’s identity has traversed an interesting path, from being related
to health (“Qigong therapy”), to science (“Qigong science,” “life science” or “human body
science”), and to something more than science (“The Qigong science will usher in another
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scientific revolution”).

Most scholars working on Qigong historiography make reference to David Palmer’s
authoritative account of Qigong trajectory in modern China.
184
However, while Palmer the
anthropologist emphasizes institutions and processes in establishing what he calls “the
Qigong sectors,” my exploration is of a narrower focus on the discursive movement of the
four topoi. Given the timeframe of Palmer’s work, he but gave a hasty acknowledgement
in the direction of Falun Gong. In this chapter, I will illustrate how Falun Gong’s
emergence extended the “science” parameter established in discussions pertaining to
Qigong.

The Birth of Modern Qigong: Legitimating Qigong through Medicine

Qigong, as we know it now, a confection of therapeutics, sports, and medicine, was a
recent invention, its birth in the late 1940s and early 1950s a function of three factors: the
health need of the nascent socialist state, the ideological dominance of modernism and
Marxism, and Qigong’s own versatility which allowed itself to be revamped and
incorporated into the socialist medical establishment.

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In the late 1940s, to the young People’s Republic newly emerging out of a
three-year-long civil war, health was an urgent matter to tend to. Decades of warlord
predations and colonial exploitations had shattered the domestic economy, leaving the
body politic effete and desperate. Epidemics were rampant, but the country’s medical
system was in disrepair. National health was treated as a political imperative and the state
called on each individual citizen to be “patriotic” through maintaining good personal and
community hygiene. To be sure, Marxism, the hegemonic ideology, favored
Western-modeled bioscience rather than the indigenous medicine heavily imbued with
religious symbols and esoteric concepts. However, trained doctors of Western medicine
were out of proportion to patients needing care. Their rarity, coupled with their elitist
attitude to adhere to expert opinions rather than to heed the Party boss’ directives,
contributed to alienating the communist leadership. Mao was notoriously disdainful of
intellectuals’ “bourgeoisie arrogance.” He soon mounted campaigns to downplay the
importance of “expert system” while encouraging what he perceived to be “democratic
medicine.” China’s rift with the Soviet Union – China’s only lifeline of Western science
and technology during the Cold War days – furthered the “nativist” proclivity as far as
medicinal science was concerned. There was definitely a need for local medical practices
stemming from “the lived experiences of the people.” Against this backdrop, Qigong
entered the scene as a branch of traditional Chinese medicine. However, it needed to
negotiate its way through the dominant political and ideological filters such as
elitist/proletarian, imported/nativist, and scientific/superstitious.
185

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As addressed in chapter 2, Qigong is a malleable and miscellaneous concept. Qi refers
to a host of inter-related phenomena such as “air,” “vital energy,” “human
breath/breathing,” and “cosmic breath.” Philosophically and physically, it has been
postulated to be the fundamental substance, the common medium linking matter, energy
and spirit, and the drive to move and regulate things.
186
It has inspired Qi-based practices
and knowledge systems significant for medicine, martial arts, scholastic tradition,
philosophy and religion. The fact that Qigong represents an inclusive approach turns out to
be an advantage since it contains elements that can be “recuperated” by the new regime.
Yet, by virtue of its close connection to religion and spirituality, Qi practices needed to be
“cleansed” of their “feudal” baggage. What’s more, the production and transmission of
Qi-related knowledge was not only mystic, exclusively conducted between masters and
disciples or fathers and sons in tribal, village settings, but also chaotic, with disparate
schools adopting equivocal terms and loosely-defined pedagogies. In this regard, Qi had to
be inducted into the modern paradigm of knowledge production and transmission, namely,
to be defined, classified, standardized and demystified. Such were the burdens and tasks of
Qi-related practices in the early 1950s.

As has been well-documented, the birth of modern day Qigong came by way of a
government official’s accidental and fated encounter -- it seems that from its onset,
Qigong’s fate relies on that of its patron.

99
In 1947, Liu Guizhen, a young cadre from the communist “liberated zone” in Hebei
province, returned to his native village on sick leave. There, he chanced upon an old
master in the mountain. After 102 days of practicing a traditional callisthenic exercise
involving breathing, visualizing, meditation and mantra chanting, his ulcer was cured and
his overall conditions improved. The master’s practice dated back to the mid-seventeenth
century and Liu could have been ordained a sixth-generation disciple if he were to follow
the old master-apprentice lineage system.
187
On the contrary, what could have gone down
in local legends and kung fu fictions – which often feature opportune encounters of
innocent youths with wise teachers in remote and magic places – ended up on a very
different track: Liu was to move the practice out of the mountain.

When Liu returned to his workplace, he informed his leaders of the easy-to-do practice
at little cost. What stood out from Liu’s briefing was, in his words, that a set of “body
technologies” could “bring health and vigor to the sickly masses.”
188
Pleased, the local
leadership charged Liu to fully study the system, impart its methodology to medical
professionals and conduct clinical research on its effect. This moment marked the
beginning of modernizing Qigong as it was welcome on board by the socialist leadership
as something of a therapy.
189

What Liu and his colleagues essentially accomplished was to remove the “superstitious
and bad elements” (mixin zaopo) perceived to plaque Qigong. The Qi practice was to be
100
separated from its religious origins – be it Buddhism, Taoism or folk religions, its spiritual
aspect discarded in favor of the physical and therapeutic functions in service of health. To
sever Qigong’s religious ties, Liu and his colleagues first sought to reinvent Qigong’s
origin. According to Liu, “Qigong therapy was born from the knowledge of the great
working people but, unfortunately, was exploited by Buddhism and Daoism and cloaked in
superstition and mystery.”
190
Then, they set out to “purify” the Qi rhetoric by removing
the “superstitious” lingual garb. For instance, they expunged metaphorical and mystic
symbolisms and replaced them with simple and straight-forward instructions so that “to
visualize and connect the niwan palace in one’s body with the heavenly urn” and let “the
golden dragon sit sovereignly in the Zen chamber” was dumbed down to “I calm my mind
and sit in peace” for the sake of “robust strength and health.”
191
With the bodily side
recuperated, Liu moved on to codify practice routines and techniques in terms of postures,
gestures, movements, and positions. Thus modified, Qigong was fit to be taught and
practiced in urban clinics and sanitariums. Liu’s efforts were significant: It severed Qigong
from its spiritual origin and equated it with little more than body technologies. Their
method set the prototypes for future Qigong representations where corporeality is
accentuated at the expense of spirituality.
192
Qigong “doctors” (no longer “masters”) were
invited into the ranks of medical professionals engaged in collective and systematic
production of Qigong knowledge. Qigong’s existence was no longer confined to secretive
familial transmission and exclusive apprenticeship.

101
David Palmer points out that Qigong is an umbrella term indiscriminately lumping
together various practices cultivating physical fitness and spiritual elevation. Before the
invention of “Qigong,” in its place were a miscellaneous collection of practices including
(but not limited to) taichi, martial arts, Taoist practices, Buddhist meditation, and various
indigenous systems, each adhering to its unique spiritual underpinnings and methodologies.

193
When the importance of spirituality was downplayed and the ground was evened
among what used to be considered disparate practices, a generic, inclusive category was
called into being. Per Liu’s vision, something should arise to designate all
“body-mind-breath” practices regardless of their previously held differences. From this
overhaul came Qigong, a human-body centric phenomena having little to do with theistic
or salvational purposes. Liu thus explains his terminological selection:

The character “Qi” here means breath, and “Gong” means a constant exercise to regulate
breath and posture; that is to say, what popular parlance calls to practice until one has
mastery…; to use medical perspectives to organize and research this Qigong method;
and to use it for therapy and hygiene, while removing the superstitious dross of old; so it
is thus called Qigong therapy.
194

Thus, Qigong was reduced to “Qigong therapy,” a legitimate term gradually gaining
traction in the Chinese medical circle.
195
Later on, other scholars further elaborated
Qigong through biomedical lens, contending that the Qi phenomenon was but a function of
102
human nervous system, its healing effect perfectly in sync with modern psychological and
neurological science.
196

Qigong’s revamp in the late 1940s and early 1950s should be viewed against the broad
tendency indigenous medicine and indigenous religions went through under the pressure of
modernization, a trend befalling Korea, China, Tibet, and India alike.
197
In those countries,
indigenous religions and medicine had to submit to institutional modernity through a
paradigmatic shift in terms of theories, practices and methods. At the same time of being
incorporated into the establishment, what was once fluid and malleable is then collapsed
and simplified into compartmentalized categories and quantifiable measurements. In China,
the role of the state was particularly prominent in effecting the transformation. For
instance, Mao Tse-tung clearly directed in the 1950s that “the Chinese medicine is to be
reformulated along the Western path.”
198
Apparently, the new knowledge regime owed its
existence to a political vision which politicized “religion” as “dirty” and superfluous while
promoting “health” as primarily corporeal, technical, nativist, in service of the socialist
state and the proletarian masses, and professionally practiced in institutions. In the process,
some political patrons played a pivotal role in securing a necessary permit for Qigong to
enter the mainstream. The constructed notion of socialist and modern “health” itself can be
seen as an embodiment of reigning political wisdoms. A category of “health” was hence
born which cleaned Qigong of religious sediments and appropriated it as a form of
therapeutics.
103
Since its being legitimated as mainstream medicinal knowledge and practice, Qigong
was to experience its first golden period for 15 years. On March 3, 1949, a regional
administrator, Huang Yuntin, Liu Guizhen’s boss, formally announced the adoption of the
label “Qigong” at an official meeting on health. In its wake, a number of Qigong hospitals,
clinics, and sanatoria were founded by official health departments in a few cities in
Northern China. Liu Guizhen, the mediator between Qigong’s previous popular,
indigenous existence and its subsequent bureaucratization, was commissioned to open
Beidaihe Qigong sanatorium, the single most important Qigong institution until 1965, with
its clientele exclusively consisting of China’s top leadership. One of the faithful
patients/patrons was Liu Shaoqi (no relation to Liu Guizhen), then Chairman of the
People’s Republic, and a frequent guest at the same sanatorium. Liu Shaoqi was said to
have personally secured funding for the expansion of the venue. Liu Guizhen, due to his
contribution to the development and nationalization of a branch of socialist medicine, was
recognized by top party officials. His story received front-page coverage in People’s Daily
and Mao personally awarded him a badge of honor.

Qigong’s Resurgence: Legitimating Qigong through Science

Falun Gong’s founder Li Hongzhi writes that Qigong is a “neologism” invented in
contemporary China to capture the material side of the practice. Being dispensed with
“feudal dross” helps Qigong dodge adverse political consequences.
199
Although
104
temporarily sanctioned as part of traditional Chinese medicine in service of socialist health
project, Qigong’s legitimacy was but a flimsy pact and a fragile compromise. In time, its
impure “superstitious” origin – always an object of contention – would come back and
haunt it. As it happened, Qigong’s heyday was put to an end with the advent of the
Cultural Revolution. Its most powerful patron Liu Shaoqi fell, purged out of the Party,
bringing Qigong down with him (some argue that his fall was partly attributable to his
investment in Qigong). The official Qigong institutions established in the 1950s were shut
down. Young cadre Liu Guizhen, the initiator of modern Qigong therapy, was also
expelled from the Party and sent to a “reform camp.” Qigong was no longer deemed “a
treasure from traditional Chinese medicine” but was instead reclassified as “superstitious
poison,” undergoing a hiatus of more than a decade.
200
To survive, Qigong needed to
have a stronger basis to warrant its legitimacy, and it found science.

As an important prelude to Qigong being elaborated as science, a figure needs to be
remembered. Guo Lin, a painter affiliated with the Beijing Academy of Arts as well as a
“hardy Qigong master,” is credited to be almost single-handedly responsible for the
popularization of Qigong after the Cultural Revolution. According to David Ownby, Ms.
Guo was the critical person to move Qigong “out of the clinic” and “into the park.” Since
curing her own uterine cancer with the Qigong methods she learned as a child, in the
1970s, Guo Lin made an effort to teach Qigong at Beijing’s Dongdan Park. Although
winning appreciation from students and patients, she always needed to grapple with the
105
“superstition” stigma pinned on Qigong. In spite of frequent run-ins with authorities, Guo
Lin persisted. To give a flavor of her resilience:

...Chinese authorities were uncomfortable with her activities; accused of superstitious
practices and of defrauding the masses, she was run out of Dongdan Park. Apparently
undaunted, Guo Lin simply moved her activities to another park, Longtanhu. There, too,
she met with harassment: two of her students were arrested and imprisoned for twenty
days, and police raided Guo Lin's apartment and confiscated the qigong materials she
had painstakingly assembled. Between 1971 and 1977, Guo was interrogated seven
times by the police and criticized many times by her work unit.
201

Finally, not dissimilar to Qigong’s legitimation in the early 1950s, interventions from a
powerful political patron saved Guo Lin and secured for her a permanent venue to promote
her methods.
202
In retrospect, her contribution lies in “inaugurating a new, collective form
of Qigong teaching and practice that would later be adopted by most Qigong masters,
stimulating a new excitement for Qigong at the end of 1970s.”
203
Qigong’s entry into the
public space of parks and city squares broke down the divide between medical
professionals and the lay persons. Since then, there appeared a flourishing of Qigong
amateurs-turned-adepts treating themselves and fellow patients. Guo Lin’s efforts helped
guide Qigong out of the walls of medical institutes and in the direction of sports and
self-healing arts, making it a public undertaking housed in informal organizations.

106
Qigong’s return and revival as a public engagement coincided with the liberalization of
many aspects of Chinese life at the end of Mao’s rule. Suppressed mainline and folk
religions were gradually coming back, civic organizations starting to appear, and “science
and technology” received a new boost through a major policy overhaul. “Modernization in
agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology,” as Deng Xiaoping
prescribed, should replace Mao’s political radicalism to become the zeitgeist for the nation.
Policy emphasis on science and modernization signaled the new administration’s
commitment to economic reform and societal rebuild. Science, industrialization and social
development became the mantra words, constituting the main moral purpose and ground of
legitimacy for Deng’s administration. It was against this backdrop Qigong took off as
“Qigong science.”

The Endorsement of Prestigious High Science

As previously discussed, the communist cadres who ushered in Qigong’s socialist
reinvention in the late 1940s and early 1950s underlined its effect as a simple and
inexpensive therapy; they left Qigong’s “essence” and “nature” largely unquestioned or
less than thoroughly discussed. In the new era, Qigong was to go through the crucible of
science not as a therapy with observable but inexplicable efficacy, but as a material entity
verifiable with scientific apparatuses. Unlike the ways in which some 20
th
century new
religious movement leaders merely "embraced popular scientific ideas to gain an
107
authoritative foothold for their new religious views,"
204
validating Qi through scientific
terms was not a tactical ruse originated inside the Qigong circle; on the contrary, it was
credentialed scientists from elite institutions taking initiatives to research the scientific
existence of Qi and discovered its material validity.

The popular Qigong sport developed by Guo Lin and its miraculous effect soon caught
the attention of scientists. From 1977 to 1981, under the auspice of Dr. Feng Lida,
Vice-Director of the National Navy Hospital, a series of tests were conducted where the
so-called “Qi” – an invisible but hypothetically existent entity emitted by Qigong masters
--- proved to have the effect of killing 30% of cancer cells.
205
The milestone decidedly
extracting Qigong from the rank of “witchcraft” and “voodoo magic,” however, was laid
down by Gu Hansen, a radiologist at Shanghai Institute of Atomic Research, when she
made a sensation with her discovery in 1979. What distinguishes Gu Hansen’s
achievement is not just her Qigong experiment. Her memoir, to be soon circulated as a
popular read, documents in detail the scientific journey she undertook, and was considered
a legitimating device in its own right. In it, she recalled the excitement and trepidations
with which she encountered something unaccountable yet wondrous, and how she, a
scientist with piqued interest, managed to overcome adversities and biases to persist in her
research.

108
At the end of 1977, by chance, I became acquainted with the therapeutic method of
movement by Qi. With my own eyes, I saw this therapeutic method—without
medication, without a needle, and without contact with the body of the patient—succeed
in making a paraplegic, paralyzed in both legs, able to crouch and to get up. This
miraculous event opened new horizons for me, to the extent that I could no longer
remain still. I felt I was at the entrance of a new domain – the science of life.
206

Against all odds, Gu pushed forward with stamina and determination. Her courage and
ingeniousness won through. Her account deserves to be quoted in length:

Would I have the courage to open this mysterious door?…I felt my way, I experimented.
Given that my work was “individual and underground” I had to consider, conceive and
do everything myself: the difficulties were numerous: How to judge the physical
properties of a phenomenon of Qigong? How to conceive and to construct the detection
devices? How to understand the experiment in detection? And so on. But the future
prospect for the study of Qigong’s miraculous phenomena greatly attracted me. The
point and the time of the Qigong master’s emission of “gong” entirely matched with the
changes detected by the device: where the point of emission of gong produces a
sensation of heat, the device detects a fluctuation in the low frequency modulation of
infrared electromagnetic rays; when a feeling of numbness follows the meridians until it
reaches the point of emission of gong, the device detects a concentration of static
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electricity or of low frequency magnetic signals; when, before the emission of gong, the
end of the finger is swollen, when during the emission of gong there is a feeling of
matter emitted outwards, and when after the emission of gong, the finger contracts, the
device detects a micro-particle current. The physical detectors that I used and which
were at a distance from the body [of the subject], detected the four types of signals of
external Qi as they are described above. These facts tell us that this invisible and
untouchable Qi possesses an objective physical basis. It is a form (or several forms) of
physical movement. It is a particular manifestation of the form of life.
207

Self-reflexive, detailed and thorough, Gu’s account shows the true markings of an
experimental physicist. She was not philosophizing about Qigong and science nor making
cultural tweaking so as to squeeze Qigong into science; her engagement was empirical
science in its hardcore where data were produced by means of observation and
experimentation. Her narrative also conjures up the image of scientist cum adventurer,
venturing into the unknown emboldened by nothing but her commitment to truth. The
narrative form and her scientific spirit imbue Qigong with the halo of not only hard
science, but science at the frontier. “Isn’t it the fact that when old sciences where new, they
were often taken as magic and witchcraft?” Qigong supporters quipped, inspired by Gu
Hansen’s example.
208
Her coinage of “life science” as an apt label for Qigong was to be
adopted by scientists striving to explain the phenomenon of Qi.

110
Gu’s discovery was hailed “historical” by the Qigong community as well as some in the
science circle. The most problematic aspect of Qigong lies, as Gu describes, in treating
patients without touching them but through emitting through willpower the so-called
“external Qi” to reach patients. Now that Qi’s existence is materially verifiable, it follows
that operating Qi as a medium is no different from applying any other instruments. Qi
treatment is therefore not just a placebo or psycho-therapy as some contend. To the
advocates of Qigong, Gu’s heroic undertaking allowed Qigong to “free itself once and for
all of the label of ‘superstition’ and ‘sorcery’ so long attached to it.”
209
Finally, “Qigong
has left religion and folklore to enter the Temple of Science!” remarked some Qigong
enthusiasts, and its reputation has been “restored to its proper place as China’s most
precious cultural treasure.”
210

Gu’s research sparkled intense interests among some of her fellow scientists eager to
follow suit. In something like a frenzy, the “Qigong fever” that gripped the attention of the
public was also permeating the scientific circle. Some of China’s lead physicists enthused
that Qigong research prefigured a revolution in “human body science” or “life science”
which permit humanity to tap into a life power heretofore unknown. Attracted to Qigong’s
potential significance, they set out to dissect Qi from multiple angles: some attempted to
measure the effects of Qigong with microwave instruments and thermal imaging; some
tried to describe the mass, function and radioactivity of Qi; hypotheses were raised as to
“Qi” being wave or particle in nature. Prestigious institutions such as Tsinghua University
111
and Peking University opened their labs to Qigong research. Research papers
experimenting on Qi were published in authoritative journals.
211
The involvement of the
science sector greatly enhanced the authority of Qigong’s status as a new science.

The “endorsement” by science made Qigong fans very excited. They could not wait to
make the most of these findings. They announced to the world that “Results from a
peer-reviewed, randomized, controlled, clinical study have proven the effect of external
Qigong on chronic pain.”
212
“Scientific proofs” became a staple accessory attached to
Qigong materials meant for the general public. While some Qigong followers were fond of
dangling arcane academic jargons -- “the external Qi of … Qigong induces apoptosis and
inhibits migration and invasion of estrogen-independent breast cancer cells through
suppression of Akt/NF-kB signaling,”
213
some were more into interpreting the results for
the laity. For example, Yan Xin Qigong on its website summarizes relevant scientific
findings as such: “Qi…physically exists;” “[It]can interact with and affect matter from
molecular to atomic level [and]affect the fundamental components of living organisms
(water, sugar, cell membrane, proteins, and DNA and RNA).”
214
Soon enough, myths
begot more myths. Fairytale-like stories started to build around Qigong science and
masters displaying miraculous prowess. For instance, rumor had it that Qigong Master Yan
Xin “is a national treasure for the Chinese government…that puts him under protection
and apparent control” and that he “has been invited to the U.S. White House eight times to
give energy treatments to President Bush, Sr.” who “praised Yan as ‘a sage of our times.’”

112
215

216
As part of Master Yan Xin’s crowning achievement, his followers liked to tell the
story that “[t]he Chinese military had Qigong master Yan Xin actually put out a vast forest
fire!”
217
The lines between hard science, popular science and science fiction started to blur
as anecdotes and hearsays circulated around.

Utopianism: Science Became Science Fiction

Under normal circumstances, the science community is careful to maintain a distinction
between professional hard science and science fiction. The former is known to be the noble
art of lofty thought work and meticulously crafted experimentation. The latter, having
artistic license, can indulge a more phantasmagoric vision playing with science as its
foundation. Fiction is, after all, fiction, as the conventional wisdom goes, that serious
scientists would rarely confuse with reality. For instance, the US government has been
known to be in denial of any dealings with beings from the outer space, and it is
Hollywood that has been trying to drag the military-industrial complex into alien
conspiracies, futuristic speculations and apocalyptic scenarios populated by mutants,
replicants and transformers. Yet most peculiarly, for a time, the fine line between fantasy
and reality seemed to have dissolved in matters concerning the Qigong science. In the
1980s, some ruling elites in China, represented by physicist Qian Xuesen, China’s Sports
Commissioner Wu Shaozu, and Army General Zhang Zhenhuan, were not just stanch
supporters of Qigong. In retrospect, their visions and endeavors were to champion what
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could have been called an outlandish, utopian, even euphoric blueprint of science based on
what Qigong could possibly accomplish for mankind.

What people usually perceive as magic seems to have seeped into Qigong from day one.
The marvelous appearance of Qigong masters applying Qi from a distance to patients was
inconceivable enough to the bystanders. “Supernormal abilities” as a label was instantly
adopted to designate what Qigong was capable of. Alongside stories on Qigong’s
miraculous curing effect, a number of media reports appeared which identified some
children with the supernormal ability to recognize written words through ears and
armpits.
218
What’s more, when researchers from Beijing University confirmed in
experiments that the putatively “latent” ability of extra-sensorial reading could be induced
in children through Qigong training, the collective enchantment with Qigong was pushed
to new heights.
219
In popular imagination, “extraordinary power research” and
“extra-sensorial perception” became a standard sub-component of Qigong.

Riding on the ground-breaking discovery of Gu Hansen and these supernormal
phenomena, in something like a congressional hearing, a high-level meeting was convened
in Beijing on July 14, 1979 on “the scientific reports on Qigong.” The first ever meeting of
this kind, it displayed a structure that was to characterize Qigong’s institutional as well as
symbolic make-up for the future. The attendance of the Minister of Health and the director
of its Chinese medicine division sustained Qigong’s “health” label, while the Director of
114
the State Sports Commission sanctioned Qigong’s “sports” status. Notable among the
attendees were high-level officials from the State Science Commission, the National
Association for Science and Technology, and the National Defense Science and
Technology Commission, foreshadowing Qigong (supernormal powers in particular) ’s
prospective involvement in the military industrial complex. Three Vice Premiers from the
State Council were also present to lend political imprimatur from the highest
administrative branch. Over 200 science professionals, journalists, middle-level officials
and Qigong aficionados participated as well, to complete an expansive circle of “Qigong
realm.”
220

This meeting set down the parameters in which “science,” “medicine,” and “sports”
were to co-exist with “magic” -- subsumed in an officially sponsored definition of
“Qigong science.” As part of the conference proceedings, research papers by Gu Hansen
and her colleagues were presented; a veteran navy officer gave his testimony on how
Qigong cured his cancer; the editor-in-chief of the prestigious Ziran (Nature) magazine
reported on Qigong-induced paranormal ability in cases of children reading with their ears
and being “clairvoyant.” There was also a performance component resembling little more
than parlor tricks: Attendees were introduced to a Qigong master who smashed stone with
his fists and broke a steel pole bare-handed, which he demonstrated in plain sight as the
audience looked on. Given that “Qi” was sometimes conceptualized as “biochemical
current” or “energy current,” an electronic detector was then hooked to the same Qigong
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master’s head. Everyone was amazed when the detector recorded a strong current so
powerful that the recording pen started to make noises and broke.
221

This conference was significant in many regards. It marked the official rehabilitation of
Qigong from its Cultural Revolutionary era suppression and a vindication under the rubric
of “Qigong Science.” “Qigong Science” was in turn given credence as an independent
discipline, which, according to the conference manifesto, was “no longer seen as a mere
branch of Chinese medicine, but as a scientific discipline in its own right, specialized in
investigating the newly-discovered material substance of external Qi, which could be
controlled and projected by the mind.”
222
The conference’s “magic” aspect and the
presentation on “supernormal abilities” confirmed and provoked further interests in
Qigong’s connection with supernatural power as a legitimate frontier of scientific quest.
The involvement of government officials and societal sectors heralded the formation of
what is to be known as “China Qigong Science Research Society,” a semi-official
semi-popular organization staffed by government cadres, science professionals, Qigong
masters, and enthusiastic amateurs.
223

Through “supernormal abilities” displayed in Qigong phenomena, people realized that
“magic” was perhaps not running in the opposite direction of science: Perhaps it was “at
the root of the Qigong science,” as some contended, or could be regarded “a precursor to
science.”
224
At any rate, after years of acceding to the pressure of materialistic
116
re-engineering, Qigong’s religious origin made a thinly-veiled comeback.

Reviewers of China’s 1980s like to call this decade “a period of collective
enchantment” (jiti zaoshen shidai). Throwing their caution to the wind, China’s political
and scientific heavyweights, as well as the general public and the media, unabashedly
embraced what orthodox Marxism should condemn as “superstition.” The public, the
media, and the state organs were unanimously gripped by the miraculous prospects
contained in “supernormal powers” mediated via “Qigong science.” Fanciful elements
became a fixture in public life. Contrary to the Western obsession with the inexplicable
and mysterious exemplified in UFOs and the aliens, the Chinese had a predilection for
something, as Jian Xu puts it, “much less remote, much more substantially real; something
working with perceptible effects on the materiality of the body.”
225
Qigong and
Qigong-inspired supernormal abilities were the talk of the era. In the 1980s, China’s
Central Television (CCTV) made it a habit of broadcasting Qigong feats on Chinese New
Year Eve to the 2/3 of Chinese population glued to the TV screen. On one of such
celebrated occasions, a Qigong master managed to light up a bulb by holding two electric
wires in his hands. Qigong masters with demonstrable prowess enjoyed “rock star
popularity,” and was officially put on government payroll.
226
It was reported that famed
Qigong master Zhang Baosheng had remotely diagnosed a Party leader’s chronic illness
and telekinetically cleared the patient’s phlegm.

In the wake of the event, rumor had it that
not only did he get top secret clearance to enter Zhongnanhai, the central leadership
117
compound, he was also officially hired by the Institute of Aeronautical Engineering to
work on their research and national defense team.
227
Like Zhang Baosheng, Qigong
masters with extra-sensorial (“human X-ray eyes”) and telepathetic/telekinetic abilities
were not only researched as subjects by universities but served as consultants to the police,
the military, mining corporations, fire departments, and hospitals. Indeed, their
involvement in key institutes of the state seemed all the more justified when stories went
around detailing how the Soviet Union and the United States had already conducted
parapsychology research and put the research outcome into use for various military
purposes.
228
These stories sounded plausible enough – after all, don’t the military always
pioneer in all sorts of wacky researches and subsequent cover-ups?

To Qigong supporters, its utility knows no bound. Retired army general Zhang
Zhenhuan, then serving as Director of the National Defense Science and Technology
Commission, was regarded as “Father of Modern Chinese Qigong.” His utopian
elaboration of Qigong described it as a veritable panacea, conducive to “improving
agricultural productivity, health standards, school test scores, sporting results and the
performance of astronauts.”
229
“(Qigong) can be compared to a second Renaissance,”
proclaimed Zhang. “It has strategic repercussions for the twenty-first century.”
230

Esteemed Caltech physicist Dr. Qian Xuesen (Tsien Hsue-Shen), chairman of Chinese
Association and Technology and founder of modern Chinese aerospace science, even
pushed for a massive body reengineering program through Qigong:
118
Our country has a population of one billion. If one out of every 100 people practices
Qigong, that makes ten million. If out of every 100 practitioners one becomes a teacher,
that will add up to 100,000 Qigong masters. To upgrade these 100,000 Qigong masters
constantly is truly a great thing.
231

Provided that Qian’s grand vision were realizable and the “supernormal powers”
promised in Qigong can be harvested and democratized to tens of millions of Chinese, it
would be tantamount to artificially raising masses of superheroes who could help us patrol
the streets, move things with telekinetic powers, and find ores with X-ray eyes. No more is
the need for alien messiahs or the genetically enhanced mutants to save the day;
232
no
more dependency on artificial means (biological, neurological, chemical, or radioactive)
which might jeopardize us all if falling in the wrong hands. What we have here are
self-made supermen putting an end to the cyborgian dream of merging man with machine,
for Qigong relies on nothing but the innate and latent powers in the human body. The
veracity of this futuristic vision aside, Dr. Qian Xuesen indeed disclosed an ethos often
found in Hollywood sci-fi films. For him and his colleague to openly preach something
like this reflected the bubbling excitement of the time.

119
The Justification of “Qigong Science”

Mingling science with "supernormal abilities" as Qigong science did was provocative
enough; for the ruling elites to promote such a notion on a large scale was even more so.
Soon, controversy arose as to if the so-called “Qigong science” was in reality
“pseudo-science” taking shelter in the glory of “science.” One of the major Qigong
opponents was Yu Guangyuan. Being the Party’s top propaganda tsar and a mogul of
orthodox Marxism, Yu condemned Qigong as the “resurgence of superstition” which
“abandoned the principle of scientific materialism.”
233
To him, the distinction between
“materialism” and “theism” (or “idealism”) was absolute regarding science. Yu and his
fellow Qigong assailants set out to organize campaigns to debunk Qigong and the
existence of so-called “paranormal powers.”

The anti-Qigong camp found their most ardent enemy in physicist Qian Xuesen. As one
of Qigong’s most unwavering defendants from the top, Professor Qian was also the
acknowledged visionary of the so-called Qigong science. When Tsinghua University first
released the results on Qigong experiments, Qian was the first to hail the significance of
Qigong-related research. According to him, “These experimental results are the first in the
world. They have irrefutably proved that the human body can exert influence on matter
without touching it, and can change the molecular structure and properties. There has
never been work like this before. They are new scientific discoveries and the prelude to a
120
scientific revolution.”
234

Qian’s persuasiveness originated largely from his own personal credentials and
charisma. In China, Qian’s story amounts to nothing short of a legend. Before he acquired
his official post as Chairman of Chinese Association of Science and Technology, Qian was
formerly Goddard Professor at California Institute of Technology, and a cofounder of its
Jet Propulsion Lab. Legend has it that patriotism compelled Qian to decide to “discard a
privileged life” in the US and return to China. McCarthyism, seeing one of the scientific
geniuses of the country was about to “defect to the communist China,” put Qian under
house arrest for five years but he refused to bend. Finally, Qian was let go; he returned to
China a glorified national hero, and was immediately charged with the mission of
designing China’s missile program. In the eyes of the Chinese, Qian was a Cold War hero,
an embodiment of high science, and the paragon of patriotism through science. The
symbolic and institutional weight of Qian, should it choose to lay upon Qigong, was not to
be countered under ordinary circumstances.
235

The rhetorical strategies Qian and his colleagues employed in defense of Qigong science
can be summarized as follows:

Reclaiming the “origin” and embracing history as “the loss of innocence.” Qigong
proponents holding this point of view argued that instead of viewing spirituality and magic
121
lying at the root of Qigong as rudimentary and “tainting Qigong” – something to be
overcome, we should probably give the origin some credit. For all we know, what we
assume to be “magic” and “superstitious” might as well be the essence of Qigong, having
great potentials to enlighten the path to an alternative paradigm of knowledge and thinking.
In the 1980s, there were calls to reconnect to a misunderstood past and return to Qigong’s
“origin” which included recovering ancient cosmology and reclaiming ignored religious
figures such as Lao Tzu.
236
This is a revivalist perspective staking claims to “tradition” as
deserving re-evaluation and re-validation. In a postmodernist twist, this viewpoint also
casts in doubt the assumption of linear history.

Origin does not signal naivety or crudeness; on the contrary, origin promises unsullied
purity and innate wisdom. Pretty soon, the origin of Qigong, the origin of Chinese
civilization (which temporally corresponds to the beginning of Qigong), and the origin of
an individual – children, were mentioned in a shared discursive space, used
interchangeably to validate each other. Pairing the track of civilization development with
that of individual growth, some point to the fact that the so-called “supernormal abilities”
are relatively common among children, the symbol of innocence, and how aging,
instrumentalization and modernization might have played a role of wiping these abilities
out. “Children don't live their lives with the heavy baggage of what society perceives to be
truth,” one “paranormal abilities” researcher thus explains.
237
Others, like Falun Gong’s
founder Li Hongzhi, contend that the so-called “supernatural abilities” is not
122
“supernatural” at all but something latent in the human race: “Over-reliance on instruments
and positivistic science has caused the human race to lose them.”
238
In this light, Qigong
is the very means to lift us out of over-materialization and mobilize the inherent human
potentials. As Li Hongzhi states, “Upon returning to one’s true original self, such functions
will be woken up.”
239

Gradually, a sense of national pride snuck into this discussion since China claims the
rightful “ownership” of Qigong. Probably it is a hasty conclusion after all to dismiss the
“feudal past” and say that China’s civilizational uniqueness has put the country at a
disadvantage as far as modernization is concerned. If the next “scientific revolution” were
to be ushered in by Qigong science, as Dr. Qian Xuesen predicted, China would be able to
beat the West at its own game, i.e. science. The traumatic pain associated with the
introduction of Western science during the colonial times would be erased forever. When
that happens, writes Qian Xuesen, “We descendents of the Yellow Emperor would no
longer be ashamed of our ancestors, for our reputation will spread to the whole world.”
240

A Chinese author was even more ebullient, claiming that “the first country to break the
secret of Extraordinary Powers and Qigong will be the most powerful state in the next
century!”
241

Borrowing from Marxist pragmatics. Qian and his colleagues cannot avoid responding to
the “superstitious” charges launched by the orthodox Marxist camp exemplified in people
123
like Yu Guangyuan. Not daring to challenge the hegemony of Marxism, Qian’s strategy
was to reconcile Qigong with Marxism by capitalizing on Marxist pragmatism prevalently
practiced in China. Marxist pragmatism was introduced by Deng Xiaoping in order to find
ideological justification for China’s embarking on economic capitalism while maintaining
the nominal claim to socialist polity. Deng’s functionalist motto, as he famously said, "I
don't care if it's a white cat or a black cat. It's a good cat as long as it catches mice,"
indicates that utility and expedience rule over theoretical hairsplitting. Likewise, Qian
Xueseng suggested that we should shelve ideological dispute and focus on the effects of
Qigong. Guangming Daily, the second largest newspaper in China then, echoes Qian’s
view in asserting that since the Qigong phenomenon is observable, it must be factual: “The
true existence of Extraordinary Powers have been proven; they are universal and exist in
many forms; they induce physiological changes; the miraculous phenomena of samples
moved by psycho-kinesis can be physically observed.”
242
In accordance with the true
spirit of Marxism, Qian suggested, theorists should loosen entrenched thinking, respect
factual data, and not be impeded by blind adherence to dead creeds. In the same vein,
retired army general Zhang Zhenhuan plainly hurtled the “anti-Marxist” allegations in the
direction of Qi Gong’s naysayers, faulting them for refusing to open their eyes:

The anchor point of science is practice; the quest of scientific workers is truth. True
science has no fear, and no force can stop it. In the past, some people have used their
power to criticize research on Extraordinary Powers as “idealist pseudo-science.”… It
124
(the establishment of Qigong Science) is not a victory of “idealism,” but a victory of true
materialism and Marxism; it is a victory of science. In truth, our work is a struggle to
defend materialism, which leads to the victory of the Marxist theory of knowledge, and
symbolizes the spirit of sacrifice of the quest for scientific truth.
243

In this debate, nobody would dare question the ideological dominance of Marxism and
its authoritative hold on science; on the contrary, everybody was eager to invoke its
prestige. To assert Qigong being politically correct, Qian Xueseng reiterated his
unflinching loyalty to Marxism. In a letter addressed to the Party’s Propaganda
Department on May 5, 1982, Qian proclaimed that he could “testify with the honor of a
true Communist Party member that Extraordinary Powers of the human body are real, not
a hoax.”
244
In May 1986, in a keynote speech to the Somatic Science Research Society,
Qian declared that “somatic science” promised in Qigong was similar to Communism in
that they both “inaugurate[d] a revolution in the field of human consciousness and human
ideology.”
245

Adopting a historical perspective on how science is developed. On the one hand, Qian
Xuesen and his colleagues felt the need to utilize the symbolic strength of science in
framing Qigong, but on the other, despite the efforts by scientists researching Qigong, its
exact mechanism was far from being elucidated. A distinction had to be made indicating
that the “science” contained in Qigong was not yet a full-fledged discipline. The term to
125
designate the rudimentary phase, as Qian proposed, is “the phenomenology of somatic
science,” signaling that documenting, describing, and classifying the phenomena in
preparation for further explorations should be the primary task.
246

Having established the conceptual framework to study the Qigong science, Qian
cautioned that young as it was, the budding discipline could generate far-reaching impact.
As the history of science has taught us, scientists need to have the courage it takes to make
ground-breaking discoveries. Think in terms of Galileo and Copernicus, a scholar
remarked at the Fourth Pan-China Academic Conference on Somatic Science in an effort
to highlight the gravity of the research and the risk entailed, and bleeding is the price one
has to pay for standing on the cutting edge of science.
247
At an interview in 1980 with
China’s Nature magazine, Qian encouraged fellow Qigong scientists to stand firm: “There
are always opponents to new discoveries and new researches, and the opposition would
come most vehemently at the leaders.” Yet, on matters of scientific quests, we should
“straighten our backs and hold our heads high.”
248

Li Hongzhi’s Deconstruction and Relativization of Modern Science

“Qigong is a science, a more advanced science. It is only because such people are too
obstinate in their beliefs, and their knowledge is too limited” – Li Hongzhi
249

126
Falun Gong, a relative late-comer in the Qigong boom, has inherited Qigong’s
identification in scientific terms. However, the way it situates itself relative to science is
markedly different from its predecessors. Unlike Qian Xuesen and his like-minded who
employed science as is to “legitimate a spiritual world view,” Li is not afraid to go on the
offensive to “attack the existing scientific consensus” by pointing out its contentious
nature as well as its limits.
250

To be sure, Falun Gong has displayed a remarkably open affinity with science. Statistics
has shown an overrepresentation of scientists and engineers among its diasporic followers
in North America who have not only demonstrated considerable scientific savvy in
advancing the Falun Gong cause – most noticeably in devising tools to penetrate China’s
Internet wall—but reportedly cited “science” to be one of their major motives to embrace
Falun Gong.
251
Running a word-count on Zhuan Falun, proverbially the “Bible” of the
Falun Gong system, would yield “science” as one of the most frequently employed terms
besides “xinxing” (moral character). Li Hongzhi is known for his propensity to frame the
Falun Gong practices and beliefs with reference to science. According to him, “Qigong
is… a more advanced science,” and “the Buddha Law” embodied in Qigong is one of the
“most intricate, extraordinary science[s].”
252
Li’s commitment to science is genuine, and
his goal is two fold. On the one hand, he openly acknowledges science’ importance, trying
to retain its symbolic strength as shorthand for valid episteme, and on the other, he
questions Western science’s normative claims and espouses a pluralistic view on
127
approaches to truth.

Li Hongzhi has acknowledged the importance of science by referencing previous
scientific findings on Qi (vital energy). In response to possible doubt raised against Qigong
being “superstitious,” Li cites test results where “instruments” have detected in Qigong
aficionados “infrasonic sound waves, supersonic waves, electromagnetic waves, infrared
rays, ultraviolet rays, X rays, neutrons, atoms, trace elements of metal, etc.” “Aren't they
all what is material existence?” he asks rhetorically. “They are all material.”
253

Having established the materiality of Qi, he moves on to lash out at (Western) science
for not being able to recognize its own nature as historically and culturally bound.
According to Li, science should take a second look at its evolutionist assumption about
human history when challenged by findings defying the established historiography. For
instance, he points to the Utah-found trilobite fossil bearing human footprints and the
engraved Ica stone depicting Jurassic age humans using telescope to call into question
what science has taught us about our planet and the origin of our species.
254
Li urges
science to expand its scope. Yet, what’s impeding the advancement of science is its very
own blindness. Decrying the how the term “superstition” is overused and abused, Li states
that “superstition” has become a “combative term” at the hands of the “politically
motivated,” as well as a shelter for sloth and “rigid mentality.”
255
He notes that
disregarding physically existent evidence in the name of “superstition” amounts to
128
“shaving the feet to fit the shoes,” revealing science’s own inability and provinciality. If
science continues to only “study a subject until it is recognized,” it would keep raising a
bunch of “opinioned” and “stubborn” people who would choose to evade instead of
confronting inconvenient truths.
256

The harshest comment Li Hongzhi has leveled against science is that science would not
concede to the fact that it “is a religion too,” and “a well-established” one at that.
257
First
of all, as Li notes, science equally contains a “superstitious side” in demanding “blind
faith” in and absolute commitment to its methodology.
258
Parallel to the religious
hierarchy consisting of “priests, bishops, and other clergy,” the scientific schooling system,
in order to create the knowledge workers it needs, is staffed by “teachers, people with
bachelors, masters, doctorates, and post-docs. The higher the degree someone possesses,
the more scientific doctrines he’s mastered.” By paralleling Western science with religion,
Li suggests that “science” is equally burdened by inherent shallowness and blind spots.
259

Li’s beef with modern science is not confined to the destructive side effect of science
and technology as some new religious movements and environmental groups have pointed
to; he is not a Luddite. His dispute with science is a more philosophical one concerning
how the world should be approached and interpreted. Li has described two contrasting
approaches where “Usually religions teach people to believe spiritually so as to achieve
material transformation, whereas science tells people to perceive materially so as to elicit
129
people’s spiritual trust and support.”
260
Over and over again he emphasizes that science is
but one approach, one way among many to access the world, and people should not be
fooled by its immediacy and materiality to the extent of disregarding alternative, spiritual
approaches to the world. Maybe, as he suggests, extra-sensorial ability and human X-ray
eyes do exist, as real and effective as CT scan and MRI.
261

Here comes Li’s most audacious proposition, also illustrating his science-revisionist
view at its best. The “spiritual approach” alternative to empirical scientism is termed by
him “spiritual science” (he seems to want “science” to stay on as a generic designator for
all truth claims). In this scenario empirical science is relativized to being just one paradigm
of knowledge with its flaws and deficiencies, whereas what he calls “the Qigong science”
represents the “most profound and intricate science.” What he is advancing under the
rubrics of “Qigong science” (alternatively termed “the science of Buddha Law” or
“spiritual science”) is an alternative episteme that unites spirituality with physicality.
Ontologically, Li conceives of the universe as made up of energy. As he writes, “In fact, at
the most fundamental level the universe is comprised of energy. The tinier the substance,
the greater its radioactivity, and this is the essence of what happens at the most
fundamental level.”
262
What Li suggests, briefly, is akin to the proposition that energy is
the function of matter and vice versa (E=MC2). At this point, Li seems to be echoing the
findings of modern physics. However, in his blueprint the common medium converting
matter into energy and vice versa is “Qi,” the “high-energy substance” at the guidance of
130
one’s spiritual force and mind intent.
263

264
This energy-matter can be unlocked externally
through the means of science and technology, but more importantly, as Li suggests, it is
accessible and manipulatable internally through cultivation practices like Qigong. Li
conceives of Qigong to be the very instrument of collecting, storing, tempering, and
honing this energy-matter which comprise the universe, alternative to the method of
science and technology.

Li argues that the energy-matter equivalence theory permits us to understand a few
things. For instance, unlike the uninitiated, Qigong adepts’ bodies are found to be in
possession of “finer-grained” particles that are highly radioactive. “The denser,
finer-grained the Qi particles are, the more powerful one’s energy is.” According to him,
the radioactivity of the fine-grained Qi is such that it can prevail over viruses and bacteria
and hence explains the miraculous curing effect displayed by Qigong masters. Longevity
through Qigong cultivation can also be accounted for because, at least theoretically, “once
the [human physical] cells are repressed [by high-energy matter gathered from the
universe], they will no longer undergo metabolism….Thus, from this point on this person
will not age naturally… he will stay young continuously. In the course of cultivation
practice, one will look young and, in the end, stay that way.”
265

If the discussion above about energy and substance represents the “material side” of Li’s
edifice, “moral stature” and “spiritual character” complete his exposition of “spiritual
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science.” Li has premised his teachings on a moral universe theory which holds that the
sentient nature of the universe watches over and metes out blessings according to one’s
deeds and moral character. For one to be able to access high energy substance one must
tune her spiritual instrument to the pitch of the corresponding universe. Qigong is not a
mere skill, he reiterates, and the standard is absolute that one’s “energy level is as high as
one’s spiritual (xinxing) level,” because the “characteristics of the universe” would not
allow those “filled with ill thoughts to ascend.”
266
Li writes,

In this universe all things, and this includes even all the matter that permeates the whole
universe, they’re all living entities, they all have thinking, and they’re all forms that the
Law of the universe exists in at different levels. If they don’t let you rise to a higher
level, maybe you want to go higher, but you just can’t go up, they just won’t let you
come up. And why don’t they? Because your character hasn’t improved.
267

Based on this logic, the Buddhas, Taoists, and gods are mere “persons” who have
“become enlightened through cultivation practice,” and who are masters of the spiritual
science.
268
“Enlightenment” should no longer be viewed as a mystic thing but marks a
state of perfection where the individual is spiritually aligned with the universe, has
acquired its highest truth, is able to wield great energy, and has obtained a physical body
composed of high energy-matter and hence incorruptible. Qigong is one cultivation way
that enables one to “scientifically” transform oneself toward godhood and deity, the
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ultimate self-help regimen which renders godhood an attainable existence at the end of a
long, arduous journey. “What’s superstition in this?” Li Hongzhi quips, and insists that
everything, including health, longevity, enlightenment, and godhood, “can be explained
through scientific principles”
269
In a memorable one liner, he famously asserts that
“Buddhas are the greatest scientists.”
270
Compared to the spiritual science, Western
science is crippled by its spiritual incapacity: “Since [Western] science can’t prove the
existence of gods or the existence of virtue” but label them “superstition” instead, it loses
out in producing a holistic understanding of the universe.
271

I am aware that the brief illustration above can hardly do justice to Li Hongzhi’s
theories on Qigong science; my goal is to give a taste of the characteristic aspects of his
engagement with science. As far as Li’s system is concerned, some might find it
outlandish or utterly implausible, especially when propositions are being simplified or
taken out of context such as what I might have done. Yet if one has the time and energy to
peruse his numerous lectures and writings, a self-sustaining system will reveal itself which
his followers – some of them being highly trained scientists and engineers – find
convincing and compelling. Li’s framework is similar to that of Dr. Qian Xuesen in
understanding Qigong to be a human-centered or human-body-centered approach to
interpreting, accessing, and manipulating the material world (“somatic science”) without
the help of machines. Also like Dr. Qian Xuesen, Li has tried to use scientific methods and
assumptions (physics in particular) to show that his claims are accurate and verifiable.
133
Throughout his work, one can detect a bona fide effort at demystifying and clarifying
things (regardless of its effect on the readers), which Li thinks is consistent with the
scientific ethos. Clearly aware of how modern science has undermined past images and
assumptions, Li announces a few times that his propositions do “not revolve around those
theories from the past” and those incapable of scientific reasoning have only done Qigong
a disservice.
272
Essentially, as he proclaims in the opening chapter of Zhuan Falun, he
sees it as part of his mission to “explain Qigong with modern science and in the plainest
modern terms, and…explain what it’s really about” in a way having nothing “to do with
blind belief or superstition.”
273

Conclusion

This chapter focuses on the first moment of Falun Gong’s developmental trajectory: the
legitimation of Qigong of which Falun Gong claims to be a division. Legitimation in this
case is narrowly conceived as gaining recognition and institutional resources from the
authorities. The entire process spanned some 40 years, from late 1940s to 1980s,
punctuated by two time periods, i.e. the birth and revival of Qigong.

Multiple topoi, politics, health and religion in particular, worked together to assist with
the legitimation process. Of them, politics called the shot: It was the hegemonic ideology
that endowed “science” with formidable cultural weight, literally “a magical word redolent
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of the sacred” that other constructs had to be measure against.
274
It was due to the same
politicization that Qigong’s religious association was condemned as “superstitious” and
had to be cleansed. It was the political imperative of restoring national public health in the
early 1950s that enabled Qigong to be recuperated as a socialist health category. Qigong’s
fate was also beholden to the intervention of powerful political patrons -- firstly Liu
Guizhen in the late 1940s and then Dr. Qian Xuesen and his colleagues in the 1980s.
Although invisible from open discussions, the political thread nevertheless underlined
most transactions and processes like an omnipresent existence. Being an invisible and
unbending monolith that nobody dared to dispute but always wanted to comply with or
circumvent, the political motif determined the ways in which other topoi should be
elaborated.

Under the same political pressure, Qigong’s institutional legitimacy hinged on the
topical movement connecting Qigong to “health” and “science” while keeping its
“superstitious” origin at bay. “Health” turned out to be not only a God-term that endorsed,
but a topos that built and established without necessarily being negative and combative
(unlike “science” which creates a negative in “superstition,” the illegitimate orphan of
theistic system). By virtue of its proximity to sports, national interests and science,
“health” helped throw a cloak of respectability onto Qigong, turning it practical and
material. Qigong’s identity was hence redefined in relation to a few health-related
categories, moving from “therapy,” to “sport,” and finally to “human body science” and
135
“Qigong science.” Once Qigong entered the door of the mainstream, not only was it
appropriated by legitimating topoi such as health and science, it started to appropriate and
remake those constructs in its own image. By adding “fanciful” elements and “paranormal
human capabilities” in the stricture of “science” and “health,” in an ironic twist, the
“superstitious” component once removed from Qigong as unwanted legacy of China’s
feudal past wound up sneaking back in what was known as “Qigong science.” Qigong
science was championed by its supporters as the “harbinger of a scientific revolution.” In
retrospect, it did facilitate an alternative view on science and reality, it mediated a
collective enchantment with the paranormal and supernatural then re-examined as having
great science potentials, and it was hailed as a distinct Chinese epistemic paradigm better
than the existing Western model. From “feudalistic residues” deemed inferior to science to
officially belonging to health and science to “more advanced than western science,”
Qigong completed its legitimating process, and it achieved this goal through conforming to
prevailing political imperatives, dodging “superstitious” charges, and insinuating itself into
the realm of health and science.
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Chapter Four
The Appeals of “Health”

Last chapter examines the processes in which Qigong was legitimated and
institutionalized through negotiating with the four topoi. I argued that under political
pressure Qigong’s religious origin was purged out of its contemporary formation, and
Qigong was reinvented as a health (therapeutic) practice, and later on, Qigong science.
The role of “health” was emphasized because it provided a much-needed initiative to
revamp Qigong, and it secured Qigong a cover of respectability, leading it to science. In
this chapter, I seek to explore how the “health” construct is lived, experienced, negotiated
and elaborated by practitioners of the healing art. My goal is to uncover the polysemy of
“health” from an insider’s perspective and to understand the multiple and individuated
appeals of Qigong/Falun Gong as a purveyor of “health” in its broadest sense. After all,
favorable shifts in Qigong-related policy can facilitate but not account for the motives of
social actors drawn to the practice. Only in the natives’ personal, conscious or
unconscious perceptions and mundane activities can the rich meanings of a cultural
phenomenon be uncovered and understood.

Since Qigong obtained the status of healing art, from the end of the Mao era in the late
1970s to the year 1999 when Falun Gong’s ban put a halt to Qigong in general, Qigong
underwent a phenomenal growth. Aptly called “Qigong fever” or “Qigong craze,” a
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variety of Qigong practices and schools took the country by storm. Nancy Chen estimated
that Qigong membership once peaked at 200 million, of which Falun Gong claimed
70-100 million.
275276
Literally, a Chinese individual has either tried Qigong himself or
known people who have dabbled in it. Each morning, Qigong aficionados engaged in
slow-motion routines was a familiar sight in China’s parks and squares. To most of them,
Qigong represented the ultimate self-healing techniques, mollifying both bodies and souls,
and probably much more.

Before tackling the health dimensions in Qigong/Falun Gong, it is necessary to
consider the definition of health in general. According to NRM scholar Hanegraaf, “one
of the few generalizations that can be made with some certainty is that all the ideas and
practices belonging to this category (new age movements) share a concern with healing…
Healing is a term most practitioners will emically use…for describing their practices.”
Based on Hanegraaf’s understanding, “healing,” as well as “illness,” needs to be revisited.
Medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman expands the notion of “illness” to include “a
person’s experiences and perceptions of a socially disvalued state.”
277
Correspondingly,
“healing” is concerned with the “complex social, psychological, and spiritual conditions
of the sick person”
278
– freeing both “illness” and “healing” from the confining shackles
of bio-science. Recent network theorists have also chimed in, arguing that “equilibrium”
and “connectedness” are part and parcel of the “socially and culturally valued” optimal
state: “Health prevails when the …elements …are in balance appropriate to the age and
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condition of the individual in his natural and social environment,” and illness means the
disturbance of this equilibrium.
279

280
Recognizing the multidimensional and fluid
aspects of health/healing, Susan Sered and Linda Barnes provide a comprehensive
summary:

Health... can mean the scientifically measurable cure of physical illnesses. It means the
alleviation of pain or other symptoms. It also mean coping, coming to terms with, or
learning to live with that which one cannot change. Healing can mean integration and
connection among all the elements of one’s being, reestablishment of self-worth,
connection with one’s tradition, or personal empowerment. Healing can be about
relationships with friends, relations, ancestors, the community, the world, the Earth,
and/or God. It can refer to developing a sense of well-being or wholeness, whether
emotional, social, spiritual, physical, or in relation to other aspects of being that are
valued by a particular group. Healing can be about purification, repenting from sin, the
cleansing up of one’s negative karma, entry into a path of “purer,” abstinent or more
moral daily living, eternal salvation, or submission to God’s will.
281

This chapter benefits from the insights offered by Hanegraaf, Sered and Barnes. Like
them, I will query the ways in which health/healing functions as an umbrella term for
Qigong and Falun Gong practitioners. I am concerned with the factors motivating people
to choose healing as an organizing term and the kind of problems Qigong healing helps
139
solve. In particular, I will examine how health/healing in its polysemy is employed to
mediate political grievances, achieve (spiritual) transcendence, and communicate group
identity and civic aspirations. Instead of seeing healing/health as an essentialist concept, I
will highlight its contextuality and fluidity, suggesting that “healing” with regard to
Qigong and Falun Gong derived its urgency and potency from the post-Mao, in particular
post-Tiananmen China with a shattered body politic in need of care and repair.

Theoretical Premise: the Body Agency

Traditional Western social theories influenced by the Cartesian mind/body split
conceive of the body as deprived of autonomy and agency, a mere object of
representation or nuisance to be subdued on way to knowledge and enlightenment.
282

The body’s valence has recently been restored by postmodern theorists, feminists, and
phenomenologists. Foucault, for instance, considers the non-discursive processes to be
real and primary. For him, subject-formation takes place in body’s mundane and
repetitive practices in places like school, factory and prison.
283
If Foucault’s viewpoint
still figures the body as a receptacle of power, phenemonologists such as Bourdieu and
Thomas Ots seek to endow the body with an original, expressive agency.
284
Recognizing
that people move in a rule-bound society, Bourdieu credits the body with a kind of
“paralinguistic” agency which enables the individual to break and remake the rules when
opportunity presents itself.
285
Thomas Ots, writing in the tradition of German
140
Lebensphilosophie, treats as ontological what he calls an “innate, spontaneous” life force
(“Leib”) originated in the body.
286
Combining the two perspectives (body being acted
upon and body acting out), scholars agree that the body should be conceptualized as an
inalienable part of individual and social consciousness, an object inscribed by power and
discourse, a means of social reproduction, and, in its motor skills, experiences, sentiments,
perceptions and praxis, an active agent negotiating and appropriating important cultural
symbols.
287

The body studies benefit from inputs from non-Western approaches committed to
cultivating selfhood through enhancing bodily awareness. Joseph Alter maintains that
Hindu philosophy “accommodates a fluid synthesis of ‘cognitive’ and ‘somatic’ factors
to a much greater degree” so that the “whole person is regarded as a complex,
multilayered indivisible synthesis of psychic, somatic, emotional, sensory, cognitive, and
chemical forces.”
288
One practice implementing the Hindu philosophy is wrestling.
According to Alter, wrestlers’ praxis supplies the existential foundation for their moral
and cultural life, making them who they are. Observing the wrestling routines in the
ashram, keeping good diet and personal hygiene, and being in tune with the natural
elements foster an embodied awareness that is wholesome and empowering. That is why,
when the corrupt and bureaucratic post-colonial India state disrupted this balanced mode
of life, wrestlers found themselves drained and weakened in body and soul. This Hindu
example not only hints at the unison of body and mind, it also registers health perception
141
on a corporal as well as moral plane. The body thus conceived becomes the hinge of
socio-political order and individual well-being. Similar conceptualization is also found in
the Chinese tradition which maps the body in terms of the flow and the networks of Qi.
Being the fundamental substance of the universe and “permeating the universe creating
myriads of things and beings,”
289
any disturbance to the inner flow of the Qi or the outer
equilibrium connecting individuals and their natural and social environment is considered
to be evident in the bodily conditions. Like the Hindu body exemplified in wrestlers, the
Chinese body sustained by Qi is essentially concerned with “harmony” and “balance,”
and should register in body’s physicality “disharmony” and “imbalance” when that
occurs. In a way, the Chinese body mapped by Qi offers a body-centered axiology.

I have brought up the topic of body agency (embodied agency) to suggest that the
body-self moving in the world should be studied as having rhetorical implications.
Rhetorical studies have been known for its textual biases. As Senda-Cook remarks, even
though postmodernism has “expanded definitions of text to include a variety of artifacts
such as photographs, films, bodies, and memorials,” interest in relation to body as text is
focused on the representation of the body, i.e. the “already documented.” As she writes,
“A speech is a transcript accessed online; a body is a clip in a news report seen on TV; air
pollution is an image in a magazine; people’s struggles are memorials carved in stone and
displayed in cities.”
290
The body with its perceptions and sentiments, corruptible by
toxics, disturbed by noise, subject to hostile climate and social disruption, and perfectible
142
by self-cultivation technologies, is by and large left out of rhetorical considerations. In
part, this chapter seeks to redress this deficiency by treating the body as both a receptacle
of social violence and vehicle of expression and transcendence.

Social Violence Inscribed in Bodily Scars

In this section, I contend that social violence has mutated into physical pain which is in
turn uttered through bodily symptoms. The efficacy of the body’s silent expression
should also be understood in the context of the urgency of naming and the failure of
words. An exigency thus arose inviting ingenious ways of utterance.

“Naming,” alternatively termed “framing,” refers to the process of “selectively
punctuating and encoding objects, situations, events, experiences, and sequences of
actions within one's present or past environment.”
291

292
Theorists of social action place
particular importance on naming because the successful identification of grievances
functions to assign blame for the problems, suggest adequate course of solution, mobilize
potential adherents, and demobilize antagonists.
293
The Burkean model involves an
ongoing naming process to propel the movement through Order, Guilt, Sacrifice and
Redemption. Or, in Leland Griffin’s words paraphrasing Burke, “man moves and is
moved through the rhetorical power of the word...He is cleansed by the dialectic power of
the word.”
294
As social theories increasingly downplay the importance of economic and
143
structural grievances, the significance of naming for social action is highlighted to an
unprecedented degree. Summarizing the key characteristics of social movement in
post-industrial societies, sociologist Hannigen writes that “when stripped to their essence,
social movements are collective attempts to articulate new grievances, construct new
identities, and innovate new forms of association.”
295
At times, naming in and of itself is
sufficiently therapeutic, leading to a cathartic release of tension. For instance,
psychotherapy promotes the notion of “discursive cure” to remove inhibitions. During
that course, locating and naming the elusive mental beast helps put a label on it and bury
it for good. In Peter Berger’s view, naming provides interpretive solutions to the issue of
theodicy. That is, through “integrat[ing]” and “mak[ing] sense of” “anomic experiences”
(the ultimate form of which is death), religion provides answers to the existence of evil.
“It is not happiness that theodicy primarily provides, but meaning. And it is
probable…that, in situations of acute suffering, the need for meaning is as strong as or
even stronger than the need for happiness.”
296

Despite the importance of naming, discourse is not always available or at an advantage
of verbalizing guilt compared with other means. Scholars have noted the difficulties of
articulating grievances in certain contexts. Cultural theorist Rey Chow suggests that in
authoritarian China uncommon methods have to be adopted to bypass censorship. As she
argues, because “attempts to construct a discourse” must necessarily come to terms with
“the fact that many linguistically determined senses of ‘discourse’ do not work,” the body
144
in its inarticulateness, ambiguity, and irony can be employed to an advantage to express
dissent obliquely. Besides, displacing discourse to the mute body is itself a statement of
the “inability or the refusal to articulate and to talk,” when the over-talkative state, “the
most articulate organ…speaks for everyone.”
297
James Scott comments that people
sometimes resort to what he calls “infra-politics” and “hidden transcripts” when voicing
alternative agenda on hostile turf.
298
Political scientist Elizabeth Thorton argues that
ground-up political actions benefit from evocative rather than confrontational framing of
the dissent.
299
Following their sensibilities, I consider Qigong as allowing for a kind of
“mute agency” mediated through the body.

The visibility of the Qigong body is a testament to the characteristic contradictions of
Post-Mao China where demands for social liberation constantly clash with a draconian
political system grudgingly opening up. When the reform-minded Deng Xiaoping ended
Mao’s political radicalism practiced during the Cultural Revolution, his administration
ushered in a brief period of “cultural renaissance.”
300
There were widespread
intellectual engagements with political, culture and civil affairs. Prominent mainline
faiths such as Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism and local religions started to return and
flourish. In the air was a general thaw and the reigning metaphor of the era was
“rehabilitation” – the return of normalcy, the restoration of reputation wrongfully
damaged, the reinstatement of the wrongfully purged, the reimbursement of the
wrongfully deprived, and above all, the longed-for rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
301

145
Deng, however, worked with a conditional liberation mentality, carefully meting out
measures of leniency while reigning matters in. In sinologist Barme’s words, although
“preoccupied with rehabilitation” of historical mistakes, Deng was equally determined to
“avoid entanglement in historical minutiae” and eager to “define the parameters of
rehabilitation and debate rather than let the momentum of public, intellectual and
academic pressure lead where they might.”
302
Soon, Deng started periodical ideological
cleansings of “bourgeois liberalism” and “spiritual pollution.” He also advocated an
agenda of partial amnesia, suggesting that the nation should not “wallow in the quagmire
of history” but “look forward,” and forbid discussions on regime legitimacy. Under Deng,
cycles of liberalization and restriction escalated into the Tiananmen debacle of 1989.
303

The task of remembering and re-examining history and historical mistakes was
terminated prematurely.

The “scar literature” movement provides a prototype of how body can make an
implicit commentary on historical injustice when discourses are not available. An
exceptionally popular literary movement from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, the “scar
literature” answers the need of settling old scores and treating the wounds. By recounting
traumatic experiences – exiles, purge, rape, forced uprooting, disintegrating of families,
etc., this genre supplies an urgently needed device for collective self-reflection and
healing.
304
What’s more, as the “scar literature” indicates, the priority of naming and
memorizing is reserved for the body instead of speech.
146
In the first place, the mentioning of “scar” conjures up a disfigured body image where
traumas are materially visible and accessible. The maimed body is conceived to be a
witness to historical cruelty and an avenue to unspeakable pains whose sharpness is
somehow dulled once materialized in physical markings.

In one of the exemplar works of the genre, novelist Feng Jicai presents a scene where
the “sufferers” celebrated the end of the Cultural Revolution and the beginning of the
“new era” with a dinner party.
305
At the party, a group of older generation folks, the
“fathers and uncles” who had greatly suffered during the Cultural Revolution but still
managed to keep a clean conscience, finally broke their silence after a decade long
self-imposed gag order ( partly to keep oneself from incriminating friends and
colleagues). What triggered their conversations were the respective scars they carried.
Through discussing and comparing those visible footprints of history, they were literally
retracing the steps of their life: There were scars left when they were idealistic and
patriotic youths fighting the warlords and the colonizers for the establishment of “New
China;” there were scars inflicted by the leaders of the “New China,” by what they
thought to be trusted friends and colleagues. Episodes of exile, betrayals, undeserved
hardships, stoic endurance and heroic sacrifices could be mapped onto the scars. Just like
that, serious historical reflections are subsumed and consumed at a level that is physical
and personal. The acute pain is diluted and encased as the scars no longer hurt. Sounding
an optimistic note of “embracing the new era and getting past the old,” the novel seems to
147
suggest that reckoning with past injustice can be conveniently done at the skin level: once
the scars are exposed, the victims of injustice can be at peace and get on with their life.

The same passage also contains an interesting poke at the varying advantages of the
visible vis-à-vis the invisible signification of history where physicality is prized over the
immaterial. A spectator to the dinner was a “daughter,” who, a model child regarded by
all, while witnessing this jovial occasion and keeping quiet, suffered the most. Being a
misled ex-Red Guard who beat others versus being beaten, her hands secretively tainted
with the blood of loved ones, she had no scars on the surface of her body that could be
exposed and erased. The mental wounds etched inside her, however, was eating her alive,
driving her to extreme measures of self-punishment. The novel not only addresses the
theme that the body is a container of social violence but hints that tangible hurts manifest
in physical symptoms can be dealt with and treated; it is those refusing to be translated or
transported that hurt the most. Feng Jicai’s novel not only accentuates the importance of
naming and memorizing as the harbinger of healing, but in a subtle twist, concedes to the
privilege of the body in matters of difficult articulation.

In time, the “scar literature” was to be shut down by Chinese authorities who found it
“beset with morbid and dark sentiments.”
306
While the termination of the “scar
literature” movement and other similar contemporaneous liberalization movements was
another example of the difficulty of verbalizing injustice under censure and censorship,
148
the innate drive to express endured.
307
The inefficiency of speech only exacerbated the
urge to express, albeit through apparently “inarticulate” or “apolitical” means.

The Body as Synecdoche of Social Health

While the “scar literature” still wants to represent sufferings through words, the body
can perform pains through more immediate means. According to medical anthropologist
Arthur Kleinman, the Chinese body in post-Mao China illustrated what he calls “somatic
critique” of the society through symptoms of illnesses.

Conducting field research at an outpatient clinic in China in early to mid 1980s, Arthur
Kleinman was impressed with the sheer number of patients with narratives of sickness,
chronic pain, fatigue, dizziness, sleeplessness, anger, and exhaustion. Among these
conditions, he was able to identify three “paradigmatic symptoms,” namely “dizziness”
(vertigo), “exhaustion”, and “pain” which, according to Kleinman, reflected the loss of
agency and efficiency of both the individual person and the body politic at large. Take
dizziness for example, Kleinman writes:

To be dizzy…is to experience malaise, to be dis-eased. Dizziness was understood by
our informants to be the embodiment of alienation, the felt meaning of de-legitimation
in their local worlds. The broken moral order of local worlds was quite literally
149
dizzying. To experience dizziness was to live and relive the memory of trauma.
308

Likewise, “exhaustion”

can be attributed to the depletion of vital energy (or Qi), a
“drained” psycho-somatic feeling affecting the social as well as the individual body, and
the symptom of “pain” is a direct embodiment of societal pain at large, a stalling of life
energy (Qi).
309
All three symptoms, put together, bespeak an existential disjuncture
from the network of harmony and productivity which results in lost personal legitimacy.

It is a widely-held belief in medical anthropology that a “meta-medical framework”
exists to encompass “ethnicity, nationalism, rapid social change, and social conflict”
which “resonate with and are expressed through patterns of illness behavior.”
310
This
point of view helps situate the individual body at the crossroads of the macro and the
micro, being the “lived metaphor” translating social conditions into individual
indications, the modality of bodily complaints paralleling the corresponding social
illness.
311
In my view, what’s being evoked with the three paradigmatic symptoms is a
malaised body politic losing its efficiency, echoed in the proverbial phrase of “the sick
man of East Asia -- China.” In mediating the conditions of the social body, the individual
body does not mirror things so much as reduces them – it works like a synecdoche. Just
as Burke suggests, a synecdoche works by reducing "some higher or more complex realm
of being to the terms of a lower or less complex realm of being," so as to convey “some
incorporeal state in terms of the corporeal or tangible."
312
Reduction makes things
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handier, so the relatively abstract and remote social reality can be encompassed and
accessed through the physical conditions. The corporeality of the body has been used to
an advantage, providing a much needed guise of “physicality.” Hence, what started as
socio-psychological problems are then regrouped under a corporeal, biomedical label.
Doing so not only allows personal and social distress “expressed in matters of bodily
complaints,” but some taboo and delicate issues can finally be dealt with through finding
“a pathway of medical help-seeking.”
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In a manner of speaking, physicality is entitled
to the “freedom of expression” out of the purview of censorship because the body is not
repressible, nor responsible; it helps shield the person wanting to “talk ill” in the guise of
“being ill.” Whether through a conscious or subliminal move, physicalizing (what
Kleinman calls “somatizing”) provides a safe venue. It claims to react in a muscular
reflex, which is an act of motion rather than volition, and hence excusing the person of
any responsibility in violating the protocol of speech. Physical pain is supposedly
something other than and higher than the individual who are unfortunately “seized” by
illness. James Scott calls an oblique protest like this an instantiation of “hidden
transcript” which “dares not speak its own name but is often acceded to because its
claims are seen to emanate from a powerful source” external to the individual.
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It is
interesting to notice that in feeling dis-eased, the body expresses the same cultural
principles with which it is made: equilibrium lapses into vertigo, abundance into
exhaustion, and animation into stagnation.

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The Expressive Qigong Body

The last couple of sections helped contextualize the health state of the Chinese body in
the 1980s and 1990s. In them, I argued that the individual body can be considered a site
of implicit articulation and criticism. If the body can be figured as a site of pain, it is only
natural that it can also function as an agent of change. In this section, I will examine how
the self-healing techniques offered by Qigong and Falun Gong turn the ordinary
practitioners from passive patients into proactive combatants of socially-inflicted
illnesses. In other words, articulating grievances and achieving transformation and
transcendence are both mediated by the Qigong body seeking health.

Bodily Symptoms Mediate Social and Political Criticism

Among Falun Gong practitioners, oral accounts of illness, healing, and implied
correlation between social injustice and physical affliction abound. The typical stories
Falun Gong practitioners would tell chart from disease history to encountering the
practice to eventual recovery – a tale arcing toward triumph and happy endings. The act
of story-telling is often triggered retroactively in the wake of healing, and the narratives
encompass a wide range of illnesses: rheumatoid arthritis, heart failure, insomnia,
glaucoma, diabetes, hepatitis, and even terminal ones such as cancer and leukemia.
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In
these accounts, as can be expected, the informants themselves would ordinarily cite
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physical ailments as the immediate motive for trying out the self-healing techniques,
unintentionally bracketing out the underlying social factors lying at the root.
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It is only
upon further inquiry that rich and nuanced details start to emerge and shed light on
embedded social factors: hardships in growing up, famines, exiles, manmade disasters,
bad marriages, tense work situation, etc.

In practitioners’ accounts, bodily symptoms run parallel to social, cultural, and
political factors. For instance, one woman in her late sixties said Falun Gong had cured
her heart failure which, as it turned out, happened at the same time she found out her
favorite daughter was cheated on by the nouveau riche husband – a family scandal that
literally failed her heart.
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With rich-men-taking-mistresses-as-symbol-of-success being
prevalently practiced as a de facto norm in contemporary China, the elderly woman with
her heart accidentally joined in the heated debate on marital infidelity, sexual competition
and the cost of economic liberation.
318

It is interesting how illness-mobilized verbal remembrance could only go so far and the
root cause for physical affliction always lurks somewhere underneath. Scholars have
postulated that social havoc enters the individual body through occurrences in the life
world. That is, social transformations would directly impact the world of interpersonal
relationships which in turn disrupts emotions which further “express themselves through
bodily changes,” through the “movements of livers, hearts, stomachs and skin.”
319

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Accordingly, individual recollections tracing the causes of illnesses often stay at the
intermediate layers, i.e. the life world. People tend to blame negative emotions and
traumatic events in private life while bracketing out the macro picture. Consider the
following accounts. A woman recalled, in figurative depictions, how prior to trying Falun
Gong she had always felt “clouds in my head and a rock weighing down in my heart.”
For her, she blamed her being unwell on her own character: By nature she is given to
agitation and anxiety. Employing Chinese medicinal discourse, she explained that anxiety
and concerns had “eroded her liver and spleen.” In actuality, the source of her “concerns
and worries,” or more accurately, her bitterness and sense of helplessness came from a
lousy marriage which was a tragic choice necessitated by the times: She was a
college-educated from a bourgeois family and he was a mere factory worker; she chose
him because tying the knot with one from the working class would not only save her from
the disgrace and humiliation her own family was then undergoing but promised material
gains. When the socialist class system was reshuffled in the 1980s, she found herself
trapped in a dull and futureless life and got crankier every day.
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Not so much bitter
over the topsy-turvy caste system toying with people’s lives, the woman could only
isolate her own personality as the culprit. Her example illustrates the fact that embodied
remembrance has its limitation and, through focusing on micro issues, prevents a
comprehensive examination of the underlying structural reasons. Note that the figurative
language she employed again demonstrated that bodily conditions are a lived metaphor
for social conditions: The obscure future ahead of her blocked her vision and made her,
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literally, foggy-headed. The modality of bodily complaints corresponded to that of
personal distress.

Anthropologist Francis Hsu contends that while in the West a person is defined by her
individuality, the Chinese mode of self is concerned with social relatedness, or what he
calls “the con-centric circles of self.”
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My research affirms Francis Hsu’s view in
finding that health is often perceived to be a family matter. Whether the extended family
is functional as an organic unit or an individual can fulfill her familial role contributes to
the evaluation of health. A young woman recalled that her post-partum complications
threw her entire family into chaos: Her mother-law and her husband had to take turns
caring for her and the baby, and seeing their toil only aggravated her guilt and her illness.
“Thanks to Falun Gong, I am a healthy person again and no more a burden to my family.
Everyone around me is happy for me.”
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What distinguishes her story is that failure to
perform one’s familial duty – mother, wife, and daughter-in-law – was incorporated into
her perception of health and ailment. My interviewees often imply that health should be
construed as a collective matter. A man in his mid-thirties reviewed the ups and downs in
his mom’s life. A spoiled teenager in Tianjin, the mom witnessed her prominent
entrepreneur father purged by the communists and their properties confiscated. Luckily
for her, she went on to live a sheltered life, adored, and literally pampered by her husband
and three sons. Migraine headache was developed in her teen years and something that
was with her all her life. When she felt tensions built up and clamped down on her, she
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became anxious and threw tantrums, and the whole family suffered with. “When she was
on Falun Gong, her pain disappeared and she became a calm person.” Just when the
family was happy for the mother and for themselves, the crackdown on Falun Gong hit.
“(As a witness to the past brutality of the regime) she saw it (the crackdown) as an
example of history repeating itself, got afraid, and stopped the practice. All her old
illnesses returned,” said the son with a sigh,
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saying that it was ironic a practice set out
to address social violence later became a target of such violence.

Embodied Transcendence

When ethnographic probing goes deeper than factual data consisting of symptoms,
changes, and recoveries, what starts to emerge are sentiments and perceptions aroused in
praxis, which, once teased out, afford a deeper insight into the practitioner’s interior as to
how healing is enacted and emically understood. I have found that healing is usually
realized when practitioners of self-healing techniques have achieved a sense of embodied
transcendence. At times this transcendence takes on a spiritual tone, at times it indicates a
perceived triumph of good over evil, at times it implies a newly obtained epiphany
(enlightenment), and at times it arises upon the release of pent-up emotional tensions.
Healing as Embodied Religiosity. Some practitioners account for the mechanism of
healing through the re-establishment of self-worth and identification with a transcendent
force. MacInnis calls Qigong “not a religion” but a “religious surrogate” ideal to provide
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spiritual experiences and fill up the spiritual void.
324
Even though religion is not a readily
available label for Qigong nor recognized as such by practitioners, religiosity is
channeled through embodied practices and health terminologies. There is no shortage of
experience-sharing from Falun Gong practitioners testifying to the truth of MacInnis’
thesis. Practitioners perceive healing as redemption of past guilt and purification of
negative pathogens (karma), with feelings of elation and wonder permeating their stories.
The impact of the practice is likened to a “hit” with which they are “impressed,”
“warmed,” “embraced,” and “cleansed,” before being “enlivened,” “elevated” and
“energized.” Revealed is a sense of embodied transcendence attended by feelings of
spiritual elation that goes beyond the joy of mere physical cure. What follows is a brief
testimony from Mrs Hu, a painter by profession and a Falun Gong practitioner in her 60s
practicing in San Gabriel, CA.

She thus described her first session of practice:

I felt warm currents coursing through my body, as if I was embraced by something
powerful. I have tried Christianity before, which I liked a lot. But the kind of love and
compassion (available in Christianity) cannot compare to (what I got from Falun Gong
exercises). Now my body often feels light, almost weightless.
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At this point, Mrs. Hu choked and broke into tears. What she was most eager to share had
nothing to do with religious doctrines but concerned the existential immediacy of her
powerful feelings. As the waves of emotions subsided, she continued to recall how her
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chronic insomnia and gastric ulcer had troubled her, so much so that she had no appetite
or strength for life, only a “half-human” of what a healthy person should be. Upon closer
inquiry, her illness was revealed to be partially due to the stress she endured navigating
her family and staying afloat – a formidable task as is -- in the rapidly changing China:
One day it was whether her children would be able to make it to college given the tough
competition, and another it was if the kids could find jobs afterwards given that a quarter
of college grads found them unemployed right out of school.

Addressing the function of religion, Peter Berger considers religion to be “historically
the most widespread and effective instrumentality of legitimation.” The goal of
legitimation is to reinforce the value of life, to iron out suffering, evil, and chaos with a
“plausible theodicy” which “permits the individual to integrate the anomic experiences of
his biography into the socially established nomos.” Berger goes on to argue that religion
“locates them (individuals) within a sacred and cosmic frame of reference.”
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Thus, the
individual’s ontological value is infinitely affirmed in God’s (or the universe’) scheme of
things. Falun Gong practitioners’ experience of being “embraced by a big love” (the
comparison of Falun Gong to Christianity is telling) which is ultimately healing echoes
Berger’s propositions. Their method of intersecting religiosity with heath also harkens
back to an ancient view which considers divine grace as harboring the paramount power
of healing: “Forgiveness by Christ was the highest art of medicine; physicians were
merely handmaidens of Christ who dispense things plucked from His Garden.”
327

158
According to Burke, “identification with mystic power” is supremely fulfilling; it signals
the highest form of identification, the “pure” form of “devout identification with the
sources of all being,” surpassing the kind of identification engendered during “blunt
requests for material advantages.”
328
Note that most Qigong followers do start with
pragmatic heath concerns –seeking little more than “curing illnesses and getting fit;”
religiosity is something they chance upon along the way. It is a kind of religiosity
realizable through embodied affect and praxis as opposed to embracing abstract
propositions and creeds. Sensations grounded one’s sense of sacredness.

Healing as Body-mediated Triumph over Evil. Mrs. Hu’s example gave a hint at the
newly discovered alternative reality obtained through the practice. Practitioners often
report to have psycho-somatic buoyancy and elevation which permeates their being and
provide a temporary reprieve from the toils in life. “Life has dragged my body down, but
it feels light after doing the practice,” said a woman in her fifties about her first try-out of
the practice.
329
Her reaction was echoed by most informants with comments such as
feeling “weightless,” “lifted,” “much more alive,” and “energetic.” At times, the sense of
relief comes in the wake of (re)staging the battle between good and evil and winning the
game. “At first you would feel as if all the symptoms are back and all the pains of the
past have returned,” cautions Falun Gong’s founder Li Hongzhi as he explains the
healing mechanism. “Don’t fret; tough it out. It is the very process in which your body is
being purified.”
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Endure one last blow, let it re-surface, and it will be over -- his
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admonition is well-received by his followers. An elderly woman suffering from leg injury
caused in jumping off the second floor -- as a desperate attempt to elude her chasers --
recalled: “when I first started the practice, I felt my poorly healed ankle fractured again,
and the pain was excruciating, especially during meditation. Horrible images of the past
haunted me as the pain attacked me. I could tell two forces were fighting there, the one
that hurt and the one that healed. I guess this is what is called ‘purification.’ In the end,
the good force prevailed when a stream of warmth suddenly pushed though (the injured
area). I knew then that the blockage had been removed.”
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In her instance, she was not
engaged in a full-length recollection of the past experience of torture, and the negative
chapter she coiled from remembering was not so much “talked out” in psychotherapeutic
discourses as acted out, expelled and cured before even acquiring a name, and gone with
it was a miserable episode of memory. The victory she scored was as symbolic as it was
embodied, as demons of past were exorcised through bodily practice. The language of
“good versus evil” is evocative of a morality tale, only that the outward appearance of the
fight was tranquil, happening during meditation. Healing is understood to be
accomplished as the painful chapter of life and its bodily consequence are both cleansed
out.

Healing as Practice-Enabled Public Release. James Scott observes that it is common for
the oppressed groups to experience a kind of “euphoria” when the hidden transcripts
“created and ripened in the nooks and crannies of social order” erupt from the private into
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the public sphere. I have noticed one of the most important channels of “eruption” to be
the act of spontaneous crying. Falun Gong practitioners (also Qigong practitioners in
general) most commonly experience an involuntary act of crying following “the
purgation of blockages,” signaling a cathartic moment when one is relieved, set free,
being alive again.
332
Just as psychoanalysis encourages crying as a means of inhibition
removal, so does the Chinese medicinal theory which employs crying to reanimate the
stagnated Qi, or vital energy. Although spontaneous outburst of emotion is never favored
by the Confucian protocols of reservation and endurance, in the context of spontaneous
body practice, however, crying is regarded as a natural and authorized act, shielding the
individual from the usual social embarrassment over public display of emotion.

One practitioner told me the “energy from the practice” was so strong that like a
torrent “it pushed through the knots and layers” in her, wiping out “self-guardedness,
shame, jealousy, and melancholy.”
333
Her reaction is echoed by a long poem recorded by
Thoams Ots about how Qigong could enliven one’s interior and remove psychological
restraint:

Teardrops run down the cheeks of a Qigong friend
Just like morning dew drips off a lotus leaf,
Or like a well, like flowing water from the earth.
This is really a wonderful, a god-like qigong
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That understands to express all the hurt feelings and bitterness of your heart.
…
The girl over there is quietly sobbing,
Her inside is in emotion,
…
You will not find a more ideal chance than this one,
Where Qigong is responsible for all the expressions of your hurt feelings,
Other people will not mock you,
And nobody will poke his nose into your problems.

At a normal day, you have to hide all your tears deep inside your heart;
Crying requires a quiet and hidden corner,
But today…

Come out, ye wonderful tears,
You relieve my heart and make me happy;
Fountainwater washes away all the misery
Hidden deep inside my heart
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It is obvious from the forgoing passages that part of the mechanism whereby Qigong
heals is through “crying out” the negative without necessarily making explicit symbolic
denunciations. The praxis itself functions like a subterranean current which cleanses and
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purifies without being consciously noticed. It is as if to say the augmented energy in and
of itself, through animating embodied consciousness, provides a therapeutic shortcut
bypassing psycho-linguistic perceptions. Cleansed, shaken loose, stimulated and lifted,
the practitioner’s existential being is in motion and “in emotion,” a purified life born like
“morning dew” and “well-water from the earth”. Images of existential relief and
attendant spiritual rejuvenation abound in these lines. The valorized sensation
experienced by the heroine of the poem has emboldened and empowered her. Just like the
Hindu wrestlers who mounted a resistant movement based on “a poetics of power that is
inscribed in earth, water, food, and the exercise,” the potent body technology of Qigong
opens the valve of life and affords its practitioners agency and autonomy from the
rule-bound cultural structure. James Scott highlights the liberating edge of praxis over
discourse by arguing that when the subaltern groups gain a temporary access to the public
sphere, the sense of exhilaration is more attributable to the “newfound ability to speak
one’s mind, publicly, without fear,” but not because of the message itself, which is not as
important.
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The very act of coming forth is sufficiently empowering.

Not to be missed in the poem are those distinct religious imageries – “morning dew”,
“lotus leaf”, “fountain water”, and “well water pouring from the bosom of the earth” –
themselves being symbols of Buddhism (lotus leaf) and Christianity (water/baptism). In a
way, cathartic tear-shedding like this reproduces the ritual of initiation and purification
(bathing, baptism) without subscribing to any prescribed liturgy; there is no pre-existent
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symbolism to be reinforced through services and reenactment, only the body healing
itself. The impression of tear-shedding is so ingrained in memory that it is a unanimous
reaction among my informants, who, years into practicing Falun Gong, would still tear up
whenever they recall their first encounter with the practice and how they shed their first
tears. Not a bit shy over crying in public, they would depict, in vivid terms, how “hot
tears washed away dusts and sorrows and softened hardened hearts.” When “tears flow
into rivers”— as the Chinese idiom goes, a communal bond of affect is established
among those who practice Falun Gong collectively.

Healing as Practice-enabled Epiphany. So far, I have briefly addressed the issues of
embodied naming, transformative act, and cathartic relief achieved through the healing
praxis of Falun Gong and Qigong. “Knowledge” is a natural outcome of acts and deeds.
As Griffin observes, “an act of transformation, an act that ends in transcendence, the
achievement of salvation” involves the arrival at “an adequate idea, the things learned.”

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While some scholars might mistrust muscles’ ability to communicate – after all, the
body acts without self-reflexivity, embodied action does lead to a phenomenological form
of knowledge, or epiphany, a word favored by New Religious Movements to denote
“sudden realization of great truth.”
337
By engaging with one’s own experiences,
memories and perceptions trigged in Qigong, the practitioners are able to reenact and
relive past episodes and gain unexpected insights. Epiphany, alternatively called by my
informants as “enlightenment,” takes place when latent knowledge breaks the shell of
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unconsciousness, surges in, and demands attention. It represents a momentous
breakthrough sought after and oftentimes stumbled upon. In Freudian terms, epiphany
represents the momentary emergence from crook and cranny residues of unsaid horrors
and unspeakable guilt as they are brought into daylight.

People report that Qigong-enabled performance allows them to come face to face with
suppressed memories. Christine Korischek, the author of “Qigong and Trauma,”
describes one Qigong session in which she had a revelation.
338
As she was practicing
Qigong, a force pulled her to the ground. Face-down, breathing rapidly, she felt the bright
summer day was turning into a darkness encroaching upon her. “I felt like my body was
melting and dissolving into the earth. It felt as if I was dying,” she thus recalled. At that
moment that posture struck her like a bolt of lighting, for it suddenly dawned on her that
it was the very gesture in which her brother was dying when he committed suicide which
traumatically impacted her. Having psychological training, she suddenly realized that the
painful memory of her brother had been subject to long term inhibition. With the help of
Qigong, her body had spontaneously reproduced the painful scene and this revelation
removed a mental burden off from her. She further explains that Qigong works not only
through gestural reenactment but also via enhancing her bodily senses, helping recreate
the near-same “sensation of smell and sound and feelings of loss, fear and total
destruction” attendant on that tragic chapter in life. Later on, Qigong has become for her
a conscientious and habitual practice of pressure release: “For some time I was in tears as
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soon as I started to practice Qigong and to relax my body. The blocked emotions of
sorrow in my chest were slowly dissolving.” In effect, she has adopted Qigong as a “rite
of sacrifice” to lay rest mnemonic ghosts and make emotional adjustments.

Thomas Ots came across another instance in which the body’s spontaneous posturing
mimics and reactivates the topsy-turvy world one shrinks from. A practitioner thus
describes her episode of gestural mimesis which enabled her to relive the trauma:

I felt a stream of Qi leaving the earth, lift me upwards and then turn me around in
different directions…I felt self-assured and did not go against it. Suddenly, a force
pushed me in the back. I stumbled forward and fell down on my knees. Now I became
frightened. I wanted to finish the session, but before I could get up, another explosion
of energy hit my front and pushed me backwards. I fell to the ground, and then this
energy just whirled me around and around. Again and again, I tried to stop it, but I just
didn’t succeed. Then, for the first time in all these years, I became aware of all my
sadness and shock. I started crying. What a relief!
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Lyon and Barbalet argue that it is “through emotion (feeling/sentiment/affect) that the
links between the body and the social world can be clearly drawn,” and it is through
emotion that the “the body is intercommunicative and active,”

not a “subject external to
agency” or a “discrete physicality” external to knowledge inquiry and the realization of
166
self’s potential.
340
One way to account for the healing mechanism of Qigong is to view
it as having the effect of reenacting, emancipating, and augmenting the suppressed
sentiments, affects, feelings and emotions. Through heightening sensorial organs, motor
skills and perceptiveness, “Leib” – the life force and “the living body, my body with
feelings, sensations, perceptions, and emotions” – is revived, and the body is
“simultaneously an agent in its own world construction.”
341
By enhancing the vitality of
Leib, healing practices open a dimension in which the body’s existential sense of self is
sharpened, compelling a transformative awareness only available when perceptions,
feelings, emotions and thoughts are all intimately bound together in practice.

Karma: Health Economy, Moral Salvation and Civic Aspirations

Last segment starts with an exigency created by the urgency of naming, the
deterioration of health in the social and individual body, and the inefficiency of discourse
to address the problems. I have argued that the body has the unique agency to perform
naming and realize transcendence through bodily conditions, illness symptoms and
self-healing practices. Healing for practitioners of Qigong and Falun Gong consists in
covert social criticism, public releases of suppressed emotions, embodied religiosity,
newly achieved epiphany and the expelling of negativity. A symbiotic relationship is
perceived to exist between personal wellbeing and social health, with the latter
understood to be at the root of the former. Qigong practitioners’ body constitutes a site of
167
negotiation where “political terror (and resistance) crosses from public space to
traumatize (or reanimate) inner space and then cross back as collective experience.”
342

This segment seeks to further expand the notion of health to include moral health
embodied in the idea of “karma.” I contend that karma allows for the accomplishment of
three things: First, it introduces a “spiritual materialism” by allowing moral nature to be
evaluated in material terms. Second, it builds a network of moral action and
co-responsibility. Third, the focus on karma and moral health helps direct critical
attention toward the corrupt moral state of the Chinese society and hence inspire civic
engagements.

Karma: a Health Economy and Moral Salvation

Karma in Indian religions refers to “action” or “deed” and is considered what drives
the cycles of cause and effect. Karma is a concept central to Falun Gong, based on which
Falun Gong builds its moral edifice. Burgdoff even asserts that the most important goal
of Falun Gong is concerned with manipulating karma in the body so as to be in tuned
with cosmic energy.
343
Karma spells out a “health economy” whereby spiritual worth is
recalibrated and reflected in material terms of fortune and health.
Developing orthodox Buddhism, Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi defines karma as an
accumulatable material stored “in the other dimension near the human body” functioning
as benchmarks of one’s moral stature.
344
Good karma, assuming the appearance of
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“white substance,” builds up as a result of one performing good deeds and bearing good
wills. By contrast, bad karma, or “the black matter,” is the consequence of wrongdoings.
In the Falun Gong worldview, bad karma is like debt needing to be paid back or suffered
through, being the root cause of all the mishaps in life including “disease, suffering,
troubles, friction, war, plaque, natural calamities, etc.”
345
Good karma, on the contrary,
can be traded in like credit for blessings such as health and fortune. In the Falun Gong
moral universe, spiritual cultivation is a precondition instead of an auxiliary to physical
wellbeing. As Zhao Yuezhi explains the health dynamics of Falun Gong, to “bring about
physical health benefits, the physical exercises must be accompanied by moral cultivation
and spiritual exercises.”
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Exhorting his followers to “cultivate moral character” above
all else, Li Hongzhi states that pure physical exercise can only do so much for health. He
admonishes: “If you do not cultivate your moral character or upgrade your moral
standard, or if your ill thoughts and bad substances (karma) have not been removed ...
how can you be healthy?”
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Karma also has a direct bearing on fortune. As Li
explains:

Religions states, ‘with virtue (good karma), one will gain something in the next
lifetime if not in this life.’ What will one gain? With a lot of virtue (good karma), one
may become a high-ranking official or make a big fortune. One can obtain whatever
one wants, and this is exchanged with such virtue.
348

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The significance of karma as a moral construct can be summarized as follows:

First, the karma theory has suggested a pragmatic approach to morality that is relevant
to each individual seeking material rewards in health and fortune. By predicating the
obtainment of wealth and fortune on moral character, the karma theory confirms the
saying that “the virtuous have might,” and “the virtuous have health and wealth.” If
karma is indeed the “the inexorable law of cause and effect ruling all actions, human or
otherwise, in the universe,”
349
it is an absolute and equitable principle impacting the rich
and the poor alike. Not only do the less-than-privileged feel obligated to cultivate virtue
to better their lives, the elite also have to heed the moral admonition contained in karma.
We can easily deduce how belief in karma might curtail excessive behaviors for the rich
and the powerful. “Becoming a king, an official, wealthy, or nobility all come from virtue
(good karma),” cautions Li Hongzhi. “No virtue, no gain; the loss of virtue means the
loss of everything.”
350
Temperance and self-discipline is advised for the entire citizenry:
“Knowing this (the principle of karma) can enable officials and the populace to exercise
self-restraint, and prosperity and peace will thereby prevail under heaven.”
351
Hence, a
pragmatic as opposed to theoretical decrees unfolds where one needs to behave for none
other than the sake of secular benefits. Through the health economics embedded in karma
theory, Li outlines his understanding of a virtuous and egalitarian society.

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Second, karma promotes personal accountability by positing “what goes around, comes
around,” alternatively expressed in the Christian aphorism as “reaping what you sow.”
Peter Berger regards the karma system to be following a strict meritocracy because
“every human action has its necessary consequences and every human situation is the
necessary consequence of past human actions…It follows that the individual has no one
to blame for his misfortunes except himself – and, conversely, he may ascribe his good
fortune to nothing but his own merits.”
352
Ones’ worth and fortune is self-determined
and susceptible to free will, to be justly evaluated by the sentient and moral universe.
353

As such, it is implied that karma is a very peaceful concept as it encourages individuals to
look inward and self-reflect rather than “look outwardly and blame others.” Agency and
wisdom is allocated not in terms of imposing and enforcing one’s vision onto the world
but in proportion to the courage and willpower displayed in bettering oneself.

Third, karma links up the network of self and others through karmic exchanges. Bad
karma is accrued by “committing bad deeds and doing wrong things or bullying people,”
while good karma is obtainable through doing good deeds and bearing good wills. Not
only are people bound to the consequence of their own action, the stakes of moral doings
are raised since one’s ethical deeds will positively or adversely affect the wellbeing of
their loved ones, even their future offspring. Individual’s moral state and ethical action
hence extends to impact the family, the clan and the community as a whole. Indeed,
drawing on Buddhism, Li Hongzhi asserts that karma will pass on like a family heirloom
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and that future generations will “inherit” its consequence in the form of blessings or
punishments: “Throughout the generations in the family, ancestors may also accumulate
karma (or virtue) for later generations.”
354
Thereby, a wider circle of responsibility and
care is formed centered on the ethical behavior of one individual. The implication is that
one should be good at least for the well-being of their loved ones if not for herself; one is
hence made more concerned with her embeddedness in the world.

The concept of karma casts Falun Gong’s moral advocacy into a pragmatism under the
rubrics of which spiritual quest (answerable by the moral universe) is awarded with
material bountifulness, and self-centrism tempered by altruism in service of a very
personal and secular goal. Morality and charity are not externally imposed
commandments as much as necessary means for personal benefits.

Regardless of the validity of the karma theory, my research reveals that Falun Gong
practitioners make moral choices under the guidance of karma. It is also a framework of
reference which helps shape their experiences in seeking physical, material and spiritual
health. A young mother told me that Falun Gong helped her overcome “materialism and
vanity:” “Especially now that I am a mom, I really need to be a good person at least for
my child’s sake, to raise good karma for my family.”
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A male practitioner in his forties
recalled with embarrassment how he used to feel being maltreated by his boss and his
way of lashing out – in his words, “to compensate” -- was to poach office materials at
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work. “Then I became a Falun Gong practitioner. I knew my behavior would bring me
(bad) karma. Ashamed, I donated back office supplies of equal or more value. Then I
stuck my nose to the grindstone and paid no heed to how others treated me. When I
readjusted my attitude, things started to change and my boss gave me a raise – it was just
a matter of whether I was willing to align myself with the characteristics of universe and
paid back my (bad) karma.”
356
A woman in her 60s recalled how she was tortured by a
number of chronic diseases, some being hereditary, and how, being physically unwell and
experiencing tremendous hardships growing up, she turned into a mean, irascible person:
“I used to blame my fate and everyone around me. People were really afraid of me. Then
studying the Falun Gong books, I became enlightened to how things should be. I no
longer blame my misfortune on others – it must have come from my own faults
somewhere in the past. More importantly, I have been given an opportunity to shake
things up through cultivating virtue. With this perspective, everything has been
improving. I now feel better physically, life is not as hard, and my family is happy.”
Unanimously, practitioners reiterate various material and tangible benefits from
practicing endurance, elevating one’s virtue and doing good works for good karma. To
them it is the “accruing of good karma” and “paying off of bad karma” that yields
concrete results in life. Morality for them is not an abstract concept or an end in itself but
a doable, visible path to a better, secular life. Talks about theistic salvation and afterlife
are put on a back burner as Falun Gong followers recalibrate their behaviors by making
reference to karmic exchanges happening to them. Karma for them offers an approach to
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integrate spiritual and physical, personal and community health. Instead of stipulating
stringent codes of behavior, karma supplies for these ordinary folks concrete and flexible
means of self-empowerment and social adjustment.

Moral Health Concerns Motivate Social Commentary and Civic Engagement

The concept of karma has broadened the definition of health to encompass moral
character, physical wellbeing, and material success as tied up with each other. It
introduces a pragmatic approach to morality as believers of karma take into consideration
the karmic transactions and the consequences thereof. It is only natural that followers of
Falun Gong extend the health pragmatism embodied in the concept of karma to assess
Chinese society. With that, they have demonstrated an explicit civic turn in transforming
health pursuits (moral health and physical health) into a vehicle of patriotism and
citizenship.

Zhao Yuezhi calls Falun Gong “a multifaceted and totalizing movement that means
different things to different people.” Indeed, although a significant number of Falun Gong
practitioners are only concerned with health in the private or interpersonal realm, others
find health (physical, spiritual, moral, and political) too convenient a metaphor to not be
used as a lens on the state of the Chinese society. Xu Yin, a former associate professor at
China’s prestigious Tsinghua University, situates his motive to try Falun Gong in the
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context of the loss of political legitimacy of the Chinese leadership:
I had long been aware of the pernicious consequences of CCP-launched political
campaigns which practically victimized all and spared none, including the late President
of China Mr. Liu Shaoqi. But still I was not prepared for the chilling scenes of the
“June Fourth” Tiananmen Massacre… After the massacre, as Tsinghua students were
still mourning in a make-shift shrine on campus, the spokesperson of the Chinese State
Council, Yuan Mu, had the audacity to declare to the world, both on TV and on radio,
that CCP had “defeated the riot without hurting anyone.”

What kind of a Party is it? What good could a regime such as this bring to the Chinese
people? What made them lie so blatantly without even the blink of an eye? In pain I
was pondering and searching for a way out for my country.

As I was searching, I came across Falun Gong. To my delight I found Zhuan Falun to
be a book teaching one to cultivate oneself, to inspire the kindness in oneself with the
principles of “Truth, Compassion and Tolerance,” while taking lightly the faults of
others. (I think that) Falun Gong’s approach, with its focus on self-reflection and
self-rectification, puts (moral) constraints on the individual while cultivating voluntary
kindness and goodwill in each and everyone. To our nation and our people (in this
moral state), it is like a good medicine.
357

175
Professor Xu Yin represents those who transfer political frustration and disgust into a
call for personal moral cultivation which he believes would eventually “benefit the nation
and its people.” Rerouting the suppressed political drive, the platform of resistance is
oriented toward the personal and interpersonal rather than pressing outwardly toward an
explicit request for social reform. Morality, self-cultivation and community life loom
larger under hostile circumstances, as political reform can no longer be publically
proclaimed as a valid goal. Some might be concerned about the escapist underdone in
reducing political ambition to personal redemption. “[In the face of injustice, religious
believers ］ opt instead to retreat to private spaces where their styles can be practiced,”
and their political commitments “amount to little more than waiting for the Day of
Judgment than to strategy and negotiation.”
358
However, those like Xu Yin do not just
practice Falun Gong as a passive gesture of refuge-seeking but consider it an active
exercise of public duty. His response is representative of a course of action Chinese
intellectuals have been known to take when morally repulsed and politically debilitated.
As Mencius puts it, “In obscurity, a Confucian gentleman should perfect his own virtue,
and in prosperity, he should help save the whole world.”
359
In Xu Yin’s own words,
“Since realizing the common good of society is only a means to obtaining the good for
each individual, why don’t we start bottom up?” Xu Yin’s stance is typical for those
wanting to practice responsible (albeit limited) citizenship when their hands are tied. This
is why when I conducted interviews among Falun Gong practitioners I could always hear
suppressed political angst and anger under the self-refinement talk of health and morality.
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One practitioner explicitly attributed the flourishing of something like Falun Gong to
people’s political disillusionment: “There is a vacuum that needs to be filled.” In the
meantime, filling the vacuum with a health pursuit represents an “authorized
transgression” which sneaks in a secretively resistant agenda without making head-on
clashes.

Just as the exhaustion caused by the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution left the
Chinese body politic drained and in dire need of recovery, so did healing practices and
moral pursuits take on a renewed urgency in the wake of the Tiananmen movement.
360

Indeed, on the market was little outright political denunciation – none permitted, but calls
for healing in the form of “moral-rehabilitation” and “searching for the missing good
Samaritan” were loud and clear. Discourses themed on “mending up broken bodies and
broken hearts,” which first appeared during the “scar literature” movement, were
recycled 10 years later in the early 1990s. In 1990, one year after Tiananmen, a
50-episode family-drama titled Kewang, or Yearning, took the Chinese TV scene by
storm.
361
Featuring no grand politics but the vicissitudes endured by the ordinary folks
over the past couple of decades and their aspiration for a moral, upright and productive
life, Yearning issues a nostalgic call for the lost innocence; its themes of worthy suffering
and endurance in anticipation of eventual payoff struck a sympathetic cord with millions
who had suffered and were still suffering. It is against this background that Falun Gong, a
“quintessentially post-Tiananmen phenomenon,” enchanted millions.
362

177
Not content to simply lodge oblique moral critiques in embodied actions, Falun Gong’s
karma theory builds toward a moral utopia which is a reprimand of “corruption, moral
decay, excessive materialism, and ruthless pursuit of wealth and power.”
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In it, the
sinned against and downtrodden (recipients of good karma) are valorized; doomed are
those who exploit and abuse others. As Li Hongzhi writes, “While swearing at or
bullying another person, he is tossing … virtue at this other person. Since the other
person is the party that feels wronged and has lost something and suffered, he is
compensated accordingly.”
364
In effect, by casting China as “having gone astray,” Li
condemns the moral bankruptcy of the reform program which has fostered recklessness
and greed. Taking Lei Feng -- the iconic Good Samaritan in 1950s -- for example, Li
once quipped that had Lei Feng lived in the 1990s he would have been ridiculed as
“mentally ill” doing the good deeds he did back then. “The human moral standard is
declining tremendously and human moral values are deteriorating daily,” laments Li
Hongzhi. “People only pursue self-interest and will harm others for a tiny bit of personal
gain. They compete and struggle against each other by resorting to all means.” Bad
morale was practically turning the Chinese public life into a hellish state. He once asked
rhetorically in a speech, “Think back on your life -- have you ever had three days of
peace?”
365

Li’s beef with the societal moral decay is not limited to its deleterious impact on the
national psyche. For him, moral degeneration literally eats away at the health of the
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Chinese body. Those obsessed with “fame and petty personal gain” “cannot sleep or eat
well,” and their bodies are in such a bad shape that “even their bones are black” from
dense bad karma.
366
The youth are particularly victimized by modern culture, whose
effete bodies are trapped “in (excessive) sex, drug, pornography, sensual gratification,
video games, and violence” -- things Li considers to be the cost of modernization. Nature
is anthropomorphized as suffering from egregious human abuses. Likening China’s
Yangzi River to a living being, Li decries that the much ballyhooed “Three Gorges
project,” by cutting off the river, did nothing short of “cleaving the umbilical cord”
connecting nature and the Chinese nation. In light of the frequency of natural calamities
in China, Li suggests that sandstorm, earthquake, drought and flood are the warning signs
of nature saddled with man-made karma. Wrath is directed toward those in power. Citing
traditional Chinese cosmology which pictures the king’s body as the moral center of the
universe, more than one Falun Gong practitioners suggested that only true repentance and
reform on the part of the ruling elites could pacify nature. “The nature, like people’s
morality, has being growing meaner and less generous,” deplored one interviewee. “How
long would it be before the nation heals and the natural bountifulness returns?”
Correlating human actions with the moral purpose of the universe has the effect of
weaving cosmic health and human morality in one symbolic scope where one’s state
reflects that of the other.
367

179
The solution to all these problems and the restoration of personal, national and cosmic
health, according to the Falun Gong theory, boils down to self-cultivation and
self-purification by the individual citizen. Addressing the civic impact of their cultivation
practice, the majority of practitioners would state that “the elevation of the mind and
body of each individual will contribute to the betterment of society.” Echoing the famous
Confucian formula on “great steps of self-cultivation,” Li stipulates that “saintly virtue”
shines outwardly from micro to macro: “Only when hearts and minds are rectified are
personal lives cultivated; only when personal lives are cultivated are families regulated;
only when families are regulated are states governed; only when states are governed is
there peace under Heaven.”
368
Therefore, self-development and personal cultivation is a
prerequisite before virtue spills over to “illuminate and rectify” the public sphere. Li
eschews a top-down model; to him cultivation is best seen as a non-coercive measure left
at the discretion of the individual: “Cultivation is up to oneself; it is useless to coerce
people if their hearts do not move.”
369
To those wanting to enforce their moral vision
onto society, Li warns them of the futility of acting like a disciplinary: “See, the law,
binding as it is, can hardly regulate people’s hearts; they would still try to get away with
it whenever they can. But virtue can conquer by gradually changing people’s inner
worlds.”
370
Making reference to the Buddhist adage of “saving selves and then others,”
Li Hongzhi keeps reminding his followers to prioritize “self-cultivation” and focus
inwardly (on self and one’s immediate local world) rather than outwardly. Individuals
reign supreme; things will be aligned naturally once each individual node of the network
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is harmonized.
371
In effect, Li is postulating a conception of civic action based on the
connectedness of social and individual health, the course of which is to start humble and
small, only to gradually snowball into a movement of consequence.

Striving for a synthesis of contemporary social movements and the new religious
movements, sociologist John Hannigan defines the commonalities of the two as follows:
they converge on resisting the “intrusion of bureaucratic authoritarian regimes into the
daily lives,” “wrest[ing] control over the private-public nexus from the state” by
proffering competing values, and in the meantime, in a proactive stance, foraying into the
public sphere and “collectively attempting to humanize and sanctify the offentlichkeit.”
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Falun Gong practitioners’ testimonies reveal a similar trajectory. Most of my
interviewees described the practice as a bulwark against the penetration and control of the
prevailing materialistic ideology. Quite a few credited Falun Gong with enabling them to
resist the “attachment to fame, lust, money and jealousy.” Through adherence to
“forbearance and compassion,” both their bodies and life were energized and fulfilled
with harmony and certainty. With their interior meaning-fully fortified, they were
eventually able to overcome the “ruthlessness” of the public world of competition and
corruption –what’s more, they have become “good persons showing care and concerns
for others above themselves.” Summarizing the benefits of Falun Gong in one speech, Li
stated that “(Through practicing Falun Gong,) many of our followers have mended up
their relationships. Harmony is regained between man and wife, father and son,
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mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, and boss and employee.”
373
The political and moral
route Professor Xu Ying has treaded, from micro and individual to macro and social, is
reflexive of the contestation over the shifting terrains between the public (state) and the
private. What emerges from it is a loose network of agents of change brought together by
quests for self-advancement, spiritual achievement, and moral recovery.

Had Falun Gong been born in the West, it could very well have gone down as a private
practice, an expression and celebration of self-hood (like yoga) to be possibly
appropriated by consumer culture and commercial interests. However, Falun Gong’s
unique trajectory casts it into a linkage which presumes a natural connection between the
erosion of public morality, civic responsibility and health, with the state policy being
pictured as the culprit for social illnesses. I cannot overstate how frequently Falun Gong
practitioners emphasize the sociological and civil functions of their practice. “Whereas
they (the communist party) poisons people’s bodies with toxic food and corrupts their
minds with violence, deceit and greed, Falun Gong provides the opposite,” one
practitioner stated, touting Falun Gong’s emphasis on moral cultivation as an answer to
most social problems China is beset with. Another described in emotional terms how he
once profoundly despaired over China’s morality crisis until he encountered Falun Gong
which was like “fresh rain on a parched land:” “People still tease me about going out of
my way being good and doing good. Their remarks cannot sway my thoughts any more.”
Chinese Falun Gong practitioners equate having a strong, healthy, moral and powerful
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body-self with realizing their duties as citizens, and when disputes arise questioning their
belief system, they are fond of justifying Falun Gong on civil instead of individual
ground. In the Chinese context, hardly do practitioners legitimate the Falun Gong system
on the basis of self versus society, or self over society, nor is privacy, human rights and
freedom of belief against the abuse of the state a readily available discursive construct.
Rather, people like to wage a civil argument by saying: “Falun Gong has hundreds of
benefits for the Chinese people and nation” and it is “foolish for the government to not
use Falun Gong to its own advantage.”
374

I will end my chapter on a positive note, which belonged to an episode Falun Gong
practitioners still nostalgically reminisce about from time to time, marking the
movement’s prime time in China. From 1992 to 1999, the Chinese government not only
consented to the Falun Gong practice -- since exercising one’s rights in the realm of
health and morality does not directly infringe upon the polity – but was also eager to reap
the multiple benefits of Falun Gong. For a time, the utopian vision initiated by Falun
Gong was equally welcome and embraced by the Chinese state. Under the government’s
auspice, Falun Gong was presented at ceremonial occasions as one of the iconic bodies of
China, showcasing China’s progress and pride in concrete images.
375
One of such
occasions took place on Aug 20, 1998, during the opening ceremony of Asian Sports and
Health Festival held in Shenyang, China. Over 1500 local Falun Gong practitioners
were invited to perform at this global arena. These ordinary folks from all walks of life,
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many being disease-prone intellectuals, marched in a large procession which, in the
words of China Youth Daily, a major state-owned national newspaper, radiated
“discipline,” “self-control,” “dignity,” “pride,” and “an unimaginable gracefulness and
agility.”
376
Entitling the article “A High Festival for Life,” China Youth Daily was
effusive about how resplendent the Falun Gong bodies were: “beaming youthfulness,”
“utterly coordinated,” literally walking “icons of health, energy and peace, a result
mirroring their inner states...on this festival to celebrate life!”

The newspaper article deserves being cited at some length. It applauded the model
Chinese body exemplified in these very concrete and humane personas --- not only were
they exhibiting powerful and graceful physique, they were heroes not succumbing to
diseases and citizen do-gooders dearly needed by society:

Liu Juxian, 44, was once bedridden for avascular necrosis of femoral head. The pain
from her illness was so extreme that she even contemplated taking her own life. After
her sister introduced her to Falun Gong in 1996, she has been consistently practicing it.
At the opening ceremony she walked with such briskness.

Ms. Chen Guihua is a retired professor from Shenyang Conservatory of Music. She
used to suffer from high blood pressure and heart disease. Through practicing the Falun
Gong exercises, she has recovered and her story attracted over 50 of her fellow
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teachers to the practice…What is most touching is that in spite of her meager pension,
she has been donating to a poor college student at ￥1769 per year for three
consecutive years!”
377

While the political analogy between physical strength and national power was implied
by the reporter of the article, it was given a clear expression by none other than the
attending municipal party secretary general who opened the ceremony with a speech. “I
want to salute you,” as he addressed the assortment of health groups (including Falun
Gong, Shaolin, Taichi group, etc.) present. “Your far-sightedness and vision has helped
us make great strides in the research and advancement of human body science. Your
contribution has strengthened the confidence in the glorious achievements of our
traditional Chinese culture, and it would be no time before we as a nation return to our
original, authentic root.” His speech described Qigong practitioners as model citizens and
proactive agents of change, and China has regained its glory in the Qigong body as well
as in the frontier research of Qigong science. Sounding a heroic and utopian note at a
grand scale, the party official proclaimed that “You have opened (the gate to) the Eden of
life for us all!”
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Conclusion

Kenneth Burke reminds us that identification – “the mystery of communion” -- “arises
at a point where different kinds of beings are in communication.”
379
To identify is to
seek and claim consubstantiality, no doubt, but the dialectician in Burke also emphasizes
the other side of identification. He asserts that “to begin with ‘identification’ is, by the
same token, though roundabout, to confront the implications of division.”
380
Taking into
account both sides, we can understand identification as the processes to organize conflict
in social actions by locating a higher generalization or a lower common denominator that
all sides to the conflict can accede to. Last chapter argues for the rhetorical construct of
“health” (and to a degree “science”) to function as a pole of identification mediating
political imperatives, policy requirements and religious differences pertaining to Qigong
and Falun Gong. This chapter can be viewed as an extension of the last by examining the
polysemy of “health” as it is lived, negotiated, and elaborated by practitioners of the
healing art. During the Post-Mao and post-Tiananmen China, confronted by suppressed
historical anger and censorship, participants of Falun Gong greatly extended the meaning
of “health,” animating it to address socio-political violence, personal illnesses, spiritual
yearnings, moral salvation and civic aspirations. Just like this, various non-“health”
components are layered upon the versatile notion of “health.” If “health” established
Qigong and Falun Gong in the first place, once in the door, their practitioners set out to
expand the meaning of “health,” making it answerable to various physical, moral,
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political and spiritual needs. The compass of “health” was maximized to facilitate topics
which could only be performed in health praxis as opposed to openly conversed.

This chapter also substantiates the “repressive” thesis advanced in chapter 2 with
regard to the effect of authoritarian politics which compels spontaneous political actions
to go underground and appear in non-political forms. Health pursuits are intrinsically
democratic (“intrapolitics”) by providing new means of expression and association.
Whether through embodied catharsis, gestural mimesis, oblique naming, or moral
cultivation, Qigong and Falun Gong provided a safety valve to release tensions in the
political, social and spiritual realms and enabled activism in ways consented by the status
quo. Just like this, the voiceless acquired a voice, and the sick and oppressed became
agents of change. Reviewing this chapter, the point of departure is the “repression” and
the sufferings of the dis-eased Chinese body politic beset with the inefficiency of
discourse. The story arc tends toward “transcendence” which is achieved in the
spontaneous bodily moves and the subsequent Qigong-inspired narratives and civic
engagements. A dramatistic structure thus unfolds going from grievance to its solution,
both mediated by the agency of the body and in the name of “health” in its broadest sense.
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Chapter Five
Propaganda Rhetoric: Violated Religio-Political Order and Domestic Polity

In the previous two chapters I discussed how “health” and to some degree “science”
became the organizing labels which secured Qigong and Falun Gong institutional
legitimacy and appealed to their practitioners by gathering and channeling various
sentiments, feelings, desires and aspirations. Thus set up, Qigong was considered a
politically “safe” engagement, encouraged by the state as a “healthy diversion”
particularly after the 1989 pro-democracy movement. Qigong reached its peak from
mid-1980s to mid-1990s, claiming a record membership of 200 million of which Falun
Gong reportedly shared 70 to 100 millions.
381
This chapter addresses the beginning of
the end of the “good old days” for Qigong and Falun Gong, where the “health” and
“science” labels fell apart in the wake of Falun Gong’s mass sit-in on April 25, 1999, at
the central leadership compound in Beijing known as Zhongnanhai.

According to Burke, from Order – defined as a mutuality of rule and service taking a
hierarchical form -- to its disintegration arises Guilt which in turn compels Kill or other
actions taken to restore Order.
382
Falun Gong’s mass rally disrupted the previous state of
affair held together by “health” and “science,” and threw the Party in a frantic scramble
for solutions. Unlike a democratic government in the habit of reconsidering the
appropriateness of its policy in cases of grievance-based protests – as in a “Mortification”
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approach, Beijing reacted in its usual negative, excessive manner, determined to “nip the
disturbance in the bud” by unleashing a propaganda campaign coupled with disciplinary
measures. In executing the ritual of “Victimage,” a glimpse is offered at how the
Party-state perceives itself vis-a-vis a resisting group bearing semi-religious
characteristics. By doing so, it sheds light on the underlying “Orders” defined by (some
of) the key terms which were presumably challenged or disturbed.

The mass rally, proverbially known as “4/25,” put an end to the story contained
within the constructs of “health” and “science” and spurred Falun Gong into a period of
controversy. An otherwise low-profile (albeit domestically wide-spread) movement was
hence put on the radar of Western media which also struggled to make sense of the event.
Pundits with sharpened political sensibilities would point to the temporal and
geographical sensitivity of the eruption and how China’s anniversaries were ripe
occasions for social agitation.
383
High-brow intellectuals expressed disappointment or
even distain at seeing an “un-intellectual group” consisting primarily of “retirees” in
“tennis shoes” engaged in activities – they stood outside Zhongnanhai quietly reading
books and meditating -- of unclear purposes.
384
Overall, there was a sense of
bemusement. “Such things shouldn’t happen in China,” thus commented a political
scientist to NPR. “Who are these people after all?”
385
Western observers took various
moral stances: Some adopted the traditional “state vs society” perspective readily
associated with authoritarian China and proceeded to describe the convening Falun Gong
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group as “religious rights activists” demanding rights long overdue;
386
some, caught in
the pre-millennial jitters, blaming the “sect” or “cult” for having committed a
wrongdoing, a “crime” even when “they besieged the red-walled, tightly guarded
compound in Beijing where top leaders live and work.”
387
On the surface, however, the
two parties critical to the controversy somehow kept silent for some time.
388
Yet in three
months’ time, the central leadership would announce its rage at being “challenged” and
“provoked” by its “subjects” while the Falun Gong, feeling wronged, contended that
knocking on the door of the Forbidden City was to seek approval and full
acknowledgement from the central leadership.
389
Much rode on how 4/25 was perceived
and the state policy in response to it, as Beijing’s attitude was able to determine if the
movement could continue to survive in China or be alienated into an antagonistic camp.
Unfortunately, 4/25 was to be packaged as the ground for the state-led revenge and attack,
and it was also the “original sin” that Falun Gong has been carrying ever since --
somehow, as suggested by China observer Ethan Gutmann, the government owns the
interpretation of 4/25 by assigning the “meddler” role to the Falun Gong group.
390
As
Gutmann puts it, “you can’t refer to the event without feeding into a set interpretation, a
pre-fabricated picture.”
391
Since then, the movement gradually transformed from one
about health to one of protest.

This chapter is to reveal the underlying “Orders” by tracing propaganda (aimed at
indicting the enemy and reinforcing the premise) and counter-propaganda rhetoric which
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supplied the primary (domestic) definition for Falun Gong in the post-4.25 period. It is
public knowledge that of the pro and con voices, those from the Chinese authorities was
much more vocal and definitive, proactively blocking out dissenting viewpoints. The
political diatribe came off as harsh and monotonous: “This (public rally) was the most
serious incident since the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations. It was organized by Li
Hongzhi to further his sinister political agenda.”
392
Yet upon closer examination, politics
was not the sole motif in the propaganda narrative which in fact displayed nuances and
tonal variations meriting detailed investigation. In this chapter I will illuminate how
“politics” was inflected by “religion” and “family” in the making and defending of the
orders that were prominently at work, shaping the propaganda discourses targeting Falun
Gong. Both orders – the religio-political order and the order of domestic polity –
reflected the kind of norms being shaken and the “guilt” thus triggered, and both were
consistent with top-down, unilateral “expression” (or “repression” for that matter) rather
than audience-oriented persuasion. As such, they reveal as much how the state perceives
itself as how it views a dissenting group.

A Disrupted Religio-Political Order

In A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke thus describes the tendency of Marxism to condemn
and denounce: Whereas the classical view of rhetoric is “the science of speaking well in
civil questions,” in the case of Marxism, rhetoric is “the knack of speaking ill in civil
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matters.”
393
What Burke refers to is Marxist rhetoric as propaganda, a forceful genus of
discourse originating from political dominance as well as from a fierce, ferocious and
near-religious commitment to the truth value and “scientific nature” of its doctrines
which reduce all other, non-orthodox claims to nonentity. The presumption of Marxism
as universal truth --- “science” in the Marxist lingo -- has an impact on its rhetorical
strategy. Developing Burke’s insight, Jim Aune asserts that Marxism’ embrace of itself
being universal truth has led to its belief in “a perfectly transparent language” and an
attendant habitual negligence for “understanding audience, appeals, and persuasion.”
394

However, Burke has also noted a paradoxical phenomenon that Marxism is “unsleepingly
rhetorical” in recklessly insisting and enforcing its own self-positioning as “the true
science.” What Burke has pointed out is a perennial state of defensiveness, an ever-going
propaganda war which incessantly and self-indulgently reiterates “us” being true and
“others” being “false.” It also betrays an absolutist mentality that does not think of
oneself as subject to outside assessment, having little dealing with “doxa” – which
requires attention to “audience, appeals, and persuasion,” but entirely cloaked in “truth.”
The end result, again in the words of Jim Aune, is "an … unstable mixture of romantic
expressionism and a positivist dream of perfectly transparent communication.”
395
The
mixture of expressionism and disbelief in persuasion, as will be revealed later, can be
seen in the Chinese Party-state’s anti-Falun Gong campaign and its endeavor to impose
its near-religious fervor for “science” and “Marxism” on the general public, bespeaking
the quasi religio-political nature of the regime supposedly founded on secularism and
192
rationality.

In the crusade against Falun Gong, the first step for the state was to pick Falun Gong’s
pre-established “health” identity apart. The fact that “health” could no longer encompass
the conflict in the aftermath of the mass rally was apparent in then Party chief Jiang
Zemin’s letter and memo to his colleagues. Health was but a “decoy” (mingyi) for Falun
Gong, as he pointed out in his tone-defining speech on June 7, 1999, a “canopy” or
“cover” for “sinister anti-government activities and superstition.”
396
Next, as expected,
Falun Gong was found “guilty” of having committed a heinous crime by posing a
political challenge to the Party. To accentuate the severity of the Falun Gong challenge,
Jiang held that the mass rally at the central government compound was comparable to
“the 1989 (Tiananmen) riot,” being “the largest demonstration ever since.”
397
To his
“great dismay,” as he stated, “not a living soul knew [they were coming],” and just like
that they materialized like a mirage, “with amazing discipline and wonderful efficiency
of communication,” “converging at the heart of the Party’s supreme power center.”
398

Over and over, Jiang expressed his guilt and alarm: “I feel deeply disturbed” and “I
blame myself [for not having foreseen this].” Jiang warned those willing to let Falun
Gong off the hook that they were about to make a “grave political mistake” because “the
birth and development of Falun Gong” indicated “a political contest was mounted by
domestic and international hostile forces to fight with the Party and the (Chinese)
government for a vantage point and good public opinions.”
399

193

With the “enemy of the Party-state” tone set, interestingly, as revealed in Jiang’s speech
and letter, he did not mean to redress a political situation by merely regulating people’s
behaviors in a legal or administrative framework; on the contrary, the battle was
conceived more in terms of in the realm of hearts and minds – the “souls,” actually. If
Falun Gong could mobilize mass actions by insinuating its way into “people’s hearts,” as
Jiang reasoned, we better do the same. Jiang lectured indignantly,

The 4/25 incident revealed how out of control our political thought work (zhengzhi
cixiang gongzuo) has become! If the Party’s thought work and propaganda work is
paralyzed, this loophole will be taken advantage of by an assortment of idealism (weixin
lun), theoism (youshen lun), a-Marxist or even anti-Marxist ideologies which will
become a trend taking over our ideological hold on people’s hearts.
400

Extending this train of thought, Jiang suggested “detoxicating” the influence of Falun
Gong with “patient scientific education and atheistic education.” It follows that the core
remedy lies in propaganda and “thought-work” through the means of which the populace
could be realigned with “the correct worldviews and value systems,” namely, Marxism
and science.
401

194
On the surface, Falun Gong was but a “political” threat. However, the Party always
mentioned political violation and ideological (religious) threat in the same breadth as far
as Falun Gong’s challenge to the system was concerned. It suggests that the system at its
core regards the two dimensions to work in tandem. Subsequently, the remedial measures
Jiang Zemin proposed and helped implement in the following crusade mirrored historical
religio-political persecutions that refused to separate private consciousness from public
behavior. As disclosed in Jiang’s letter and memo, “legality” (valued in a civic polity but
having little worth in a religious polity)

of the 4/25 demonstration was never an issue
because the Chinese Constitution, at least nominally, protects people’s right to assembly
and free speech;
402
what mattered was the perceived religio-political menace from a
movement supposedly able to engineer political action through ideological conversion
and mobilization. The state’s fusion of ideology and governance led some commentators
to question if Falun Gong’s rise was evocative of the beginning of the Chinese
Communist Party, and the Party’s nervousness was partly due to seeing its own mirror
image in the Falun Gong.
403
By the same token, the priority of the anti-Falun Gong
campaign was to destroy the Falun Gong symbolism and doctrines and sever the ties
between the followers and their master. Never for one moment did Jiang Zemin and his
colleagues pause to reflect on the social conditions leading to grievance-based activities
such as the mass sit-in. Their solution was simply “thought work, thought work, and
thought work.” Jiang threw down his gauntlet and got ready for a doctrinal fight. “I do
not believe that the Marxism we communists have, and the materialism and atheism we
195
believe in, cannot trump the stuff propagated by Falun Gong!”
404
Something akin to an
all-out religious war was kicked into gears, hoping to dissolve a political threat by
undermining its ideological and attitudinal underpinnings. In a way, the top-down
“command communication” approach was something the Chinese Communist Party was
best at. It was, to borrow from Jim Aune, a “romantic expressionism” at its most brutal
and ignorant.

Jiang’s directives were copied almost verbatim by the propaganda machine. People’s
Daily issued a most authoritative policy exegesis which made the connection between
religion (ideology) and politics more pronounced to the public at large. “[We] must fully
understand the political nature of Falun Gong; [We] must realize Falun Gong is a
political force attempting to contend with our Party and government.” As to how Falun
Gong might challenge the governmental authority, the same editorial answered: “Falun
Gong is a political dissenting force that negates Marxist ideology. And Falun Gong
attempts to fight with our Party for the control of the broad masses and for the control of
the ideological arena.”
405
It is all too clear that Falun Gong’s most heinous sin lies in its
competing ideology, which is in and of itself already a crime even before its effect shown
in any actual mobilization activities.

What exactly represented the Party’s ideological goals? Two antagonistic camps were
set up by the state media to illustrate heterodox and orthodox, with “Marxism,”
196
“science,” and “atheism” (these terms were basically homologous in the Chinese context)
on one side, and “theism,” “idealism,” and “superstition” on the other. At first, as if out
of an instinctual response, “Marxism,” the core ideational pillar of the Chinese
Communist Party, was made to lead the charge. Almost self-indulgently, the official
Xinhua News Agency cranked out a litany of editorials reiterated the infallibility of
Marxism:

Marxist dialectic materialism and historical materialism represent the world outlook
and methodology of the proletariat. The scientific theories of Marxism established on
the basis of this worldview should serve as the spiritual pillar of communists. Falun
Dafa as created by Li Hongzhi preaches idealism and theism and denies all scientific
truth, and thus is absolutely contradictory to the fundamental theories and principles of
Marxism.
406

The same editorials requested that the Chinese, the communist party members in
particular, enhance “their political sensitivity “and “differentiate right from wrong” by
adhering to Marxism and discard Falun Gong.
407
Thus, again, ideological indiscretion
amounted to political transgression.

As often happens in a religious conflict where the opposing spiritual leader is defamed
so as to discredit the cause, official polemics accused Li Hongzhi as one unfit to rule, a
197
false messiah for China. At this point, the communist state once more belied its absolutist
mentality, resembling an established religious leader fuming at a recent contender. First,
the state media projected doubt over Li’s qualification as a legitimate religious figure (not
as a political leader) because he had not demonstrated the so-called “supernatural
powers” customarily associated with religious masters. To demystify Li, a timeline was
complied to show that Li Hongzhi was nothing but an ordinary guy who “was born in
1952,” “went to school between 1960 and 1969,” “worked on an army farm” and “played
trumpet in a band” – there was nothing legendary or outstanding in this bio, the official
media argued.
408
China’s Xinhua News Agency went as far as locating the midwife who
had supposedly helped deliver Li and saved Li’s mother from childbirth difficulty:
“Without my help, Li and his mother would have been in danger 47 years ago.” Then the
Xinhua article quipped, referring to the traditional miraculous birth stories of historical
holy men: Where is the “miracle” in Li’s birth? Even worse, how could someone
considered to have divine powers subject his own other to such hardship?
409
Li was also
labeled “a swindler and a braggart” of imperfect morals,
410
his “holiness” entirely
self-forged because he had reportedly changed his birthday to coincide with that of
Sakyamuni.
411

Those instances described above were not carried by tabloid news but by the
heavyweights of the official media. If they ever speak up in such an orchestrated
denouncing tone, everybody knows they mean business, reflecting the Party’s will,
198
instead of catering to sensational, commercial interests. It seems that in order to discredit
a competing religious leader the Chinese state would do anything, no holds barred. While
Li was ridiculed and demonized, his clout was never underestimated. As one editorial in
the People’s Daily warned, “If Li Hongzhi’s heretical theories spread, the Party’s
foundation will be shaken, and the great cause will be undermined.”
412
Hence, the
survival of the Party depended on “Party members (who) hold high the great banner of
Marxism and guard against the erosion of theism.” Li was aggrandized into a
conspiratorial dark lord raising an army to ‘overrun the government” by means of “false
doctrines and crooked teachings.”
413
Believing in Li amounts to brushing away decades
of accomplishments achieved under the Party and denying the Party’s political and
ideological legitimacy altogether. We have to remember, exhorted another Xinhua News
article, “Only Marxism can save China and only the Chinese Communist Party can lead
us to accomplish the great cause of reinvigorating the Chinese nation.”
414
People should
forever stay in debt to the Communist Party for thanks to it we “are no longer in the
clutches of poverty.”
415

Indeed the Party-state was operating with a very arcane mentality, its insistence on
realigning people with Marxism and “dialectical materialism” out of touch and verging
on self-indulgence. Yet the Party’s fear was somehow genuine, conforming to what could
be engendered were a religio-political regime to break apart. In its classical construction,
the king is the “minister of God” and “son of heaven,” whose legitimacy has a divine
199
source, conferred to him by God and/or the holy powers that be. “The king occupies the
same position in the kingdom that God occupies in the universe;”
416
his rule is absolute,
and his body the repository of oaths and allegiance. It is “in him we find the unity” on
which the country is founded.
417
The Chinese Communist Party’s anti-Falun Gong
campaign somehow replicated the notion of the divine right of the king who embodies
doctrinal and political legitimacy in one body. Straying away from the king’s God --
Marxism and scientism in the Chinese case – is equivalent to disloyalty toward the king,
and vice versa. That was why switching religious/ideological affiliation was almost
considered an act of high treason, and that was why the first step the Party took to
manage the Falun Gong crisis, even before unleashing the torrent of propaganda
materials, was to require all Party members to renounce Falun Gong if they were ever one.
“Thou shall not bow to other gods,” or face excommunication from the Party and the
grace of the Party-state. On July 19, three days before the official kick-off of the
propaganda campaign against Falun Gong, The Central Committee of the Communist
Party of China issued a circular forbidding the Party members from practicing Falun
Gong and requesting them to “make a clean ideological break.”
418

Anyone taking a quick look at the first month of the media campaign would be stunned
by its sheer volume and intensity: 1650 releases and 290 articles by the official Xinhua
News Agency, 780 stories by the leading Party newspaper the People’s daily, and 1722
news items by China’s Central TV (CCTV), just to name a few leading sources.
419
The
200
campaign was not only ferocious, but very thorough. Sound trucks with loud speakers
strapped on patrolled Beijing’s streets shouting “stay away from Falun Gong;” work units
requested employees to “right their attitudes” by attending “study sessions” and signing
warrants that they would either recant or refuse to join Falun Gong; retirees managing the
residential community centers were commissioned to keep an watchful eye on those
already listed as Falun Gong practitioners. The campaign, fierce as it was, didn’t do the
Party much good as it hoped. First, it unexpectedly accorded Falun Gong too much
weight than it deserved, putting it on equal footing with the Party itself and making the
Party look weak.
420
Second, it turned the audience away, who were bored by the
repetitiveness of the propaganda message and embarrassed that something as
anachronistic as the Cultural Revolution diatribes were bombarding the country again.
Subscriptions to Marxism-themed propaganda materials declined, and the ratings of the
same kind of TV programs fell.
421
Four weeks into the campaign, in the face of its
declining popularity, “science” had to be called upon to save the game in lieu of Marxism
as the lead campaign narrative motif. Unlike high-sounding Marxist harangues which
were more menacing than convincing, only appealing to a very limited group of hardcore
audiences, the science motif was milder and more inclusive, meant to interpellate the
whole society to partake of a re-education project in order to keep “superstition” and
“pseudoscience” at bay. The goal shifted from protecting the Party to protecting
“Science,” and by extension the interests of the entire society built on “Science.” Falun
Gong was reconfigured from being the “enemy of the state” to “the foe of scientific
201
achievement.” Scientists were featured on national TV to analyze Falun Gong’s
“pseudo-science” characteristics; children were asked to sign their names in campaigns to
“uphold science and abolish superstition.” Science was promoted to the public as both a
moral ideal as well as the most effective instrument to “expose…the fallacies of Falun
Gong.”
422
Objective analyses, assuming a calmer tone, came to substitute the heated
polemics trumpeting Marxism as Party’s basis of infallibility. Expository essays appeared
en masse trying to detail some of the most “noticeable anti-scientific aspects” of Falun
Gong, which included, for instance, its “expressed reservation about the big bang theory,”
its “hypotheses (which) cannot be repetitively verified by several independent
experiments,” and its truth claims which are nothing “but the stuff of legend and
hearsay.”
423

Later sections of this chapter will address how “science” was invoked as the sacred
stand-in for Marxist truth and the glorious accomplishments achieved under the CCP
leadership. I will address “science” as it is intertwined with family, education and
political legitimacy in combating the “deleterious effects of Falun Gong.” For now,
suffice it to say that the quasi-religio-political disposition of the Party-state is not lost on
some critics. McGregor’s comparison of the CCP to the Vatican is quite telling. In The
Party he writes, “The city-state (Vatican) … is the only other organization of comparable
dimensions to the Chinese Communist Party, albeit on a global scale, and with a similar
addiction to ritual and secrecy. The Party guards the command of its catechism as
202
zealously and self-righteously as the Vatican defends its authority over the faith. ”
424

When what could have been a civic dispute receded into something akin to religious
warfare, antagonism was escalated into something like a life and death matter. For a
regime waging religio-political rhetoric at an audience, it means to say that the Party’s
way is the only way, and no amount of prudence and creativity can wriggle out of that
option.

The Violated Domestic Order: Arguments Based on “Turf,” “House” and
“Patrimony”

In On Justification, Boltanski and Thevenot define domestic polity through the lens of
familial lineage. According to them, a hierarchical “bond of dependency” exists between
father/son, king/subjects, and superiors/inferiors. In this model, the individual person
derives his worth from his superiors in accordance with his relative rank in the hierarchy:
“[E]ach one is positioned between a superior from whom he or she receives…a power of
access to worth and inferiors whom he or she encompasses and embodies.” An individual
only exists as “a member of the house,” not someone of independent worth; for him to
dissociate himself from the lineage would render him rootless. To the extent that a father,
king, and superior are the source of worth and value which they convey to their
underlings, their rule is absolute. Familial actions and identities are circumscribed in a
space which is physical – the kingdom, territory, or homestead – as well as conceptual
203
and symbolic, embodied in the abstract and social notion of the “house” (as in “the House
of Tudor”).
425

According to Burke, arguments based on “house,” “lineage,” tradition” and “turf”
emphasize a “scenic” point of view which underscores a monolithic outlook committed to
viewing the world as relatively permanent, deterministic, and tribal.
426
Individuals
holding a scenic perspective tend to reify and sanctify what starts out as manmade and
fluid into permanent existence. Accordingly, behaviors and actions are organized around
the importance and “inviolatibility” of “home,” “tradition,” “norm,” and “motherland.”
With this tribal attitude, minor trespassing could be maximized into major sacrilege, and
excessive actions performed in the name of defending “home” could be tolerated. Such
are the complexities embodied in the Chinese government’s “guarding my turf”
argument.

“This is My Place. You don’t belong here.”

From the way Chinese authorities reacted to the mass rally, we can see that
Zhongnanhai, the central government compound where the gathering took place, were
attached with ultimate cultural and political importance. As part of the Forbidden City
architectural complex bordering the Tiananmen Square, Zhongnanhai is indeed situated
at the geographic center of Beijing, a location invested by the old imperial dynasties with
204
great cosmological significance, the epicenter “around which the Chinese world turns.”
427

Once a palace housing the royal family for the past six hundred years, Zhongnanhai is
still home to the Chinese leadership. Jiang in his memo referred to the place as “the
center of the supreme power of our Party and the state,” and it was his worst nightmare to
wake up and find a throng of over 10,000 uninvited individuals knocking on his door.
Jiang thus expressed his alarm and anger at being caught off guard at his home base:

[S]urreptitiously, as if out of nowhere (shen bu zhi, gui bu que), over 10,000 Falun
Gong showed at the door to the supreme power center of our country and our Party.
They bypassed our intelligence systems…, they surrounded Zhongnanhai, and… they
infiltrated into the Party ranks and the military.
428

To Jiang, sullying the holy land of Zhongnanhai was a symbolic attack as well as an
illegal infiltration. Adopting a scenic perspective, he viewed a surprise visit such as this
as an act of premeditation, a tour de force of some sort on the part of Falun Gong.

Even the liberal-minded then Premier Zhu Rongji reportedly expressed shock at the
sight of a large crowd converging at his doorsteps. When he came outside to meet with
the Falun Gong representatives, his first reaction was: “How come you are all here?!
Who told you to come here?”
429
When he finished meeting with the Falun Gong
delegates where he recognized the validity of their claims, he again proclaimed the
205
inappropriateness of their method: “You have the right to petition through the rightful
channels. Don’t ever gather around here again.”
430
So as far as Premier Zhu was
concerned, rallying at Zhongnanhai was not a legitimate platform for political action. A
Xinhua News article released immediately after the gathering echoed Zhu’s point of view.
Making an ameliorative gesture, the article states that “Governments at all levels have
never prohibited physical fitness activities,” but people just “need to find the appropriate
venue” for their problems.
431
Treating Zhongnanhai as part of the “Forbidden Palace”
would naturally lead to a “besiegement” perspective (“Sect Besieged the Party
Compound”) to describe the mass rally, which was equally evident in more than a few
Western media. To their negligence, the pedestrian area outside Zhongnanhai is a public
place just like the Tiananmen Square. Portraying it as “off limits” to the rank and file
suggests a claustrophobic “fortress mentality” with which emperors view their palaces as
inaccessible to the common folks. “[It] offers no quarter for trespassers, the sanctuary
into which the un-ordained and un-anointed cannot enter.”
432
To the extent that the
emperor’s house/palace is the cornerstone of the communal identity of his clan and a
symbol of his political authority, it is indeed inviolable; his dynasty stands as long as the
house/palace stands.

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The Crime of Insubordination: “Our House is Violated, Our Face Lost!”

In On Justification, Boltanski and Thévenot argue for a correspondence between varies
kinds of polities and the common worlds in terms of principles of governance. Domestic
polity, in their view, is modeled after the family prototype in which “every bond between
beings is conceived as generating a familial bond: each man is a father to his subordinates
and a son to his superior.”
433
Chinese authorities are known to imagine themselves in
paternalistic roles. In the subject position otherwise occupied by “citizens” in a civic
polity are instead “children,” who are the exemplar of all subordinate positions (servants,
subjects, inferiors, etc.). The Chinese used to address themselves as “children of the
Party” (Dangde Ernv) relative to “the Party, our mother” (Dang Mama), and children
need be on their best behavior as it would negatively or positively reflect on the parents.
When children turn out to be disobedient or rambunctious, “It is completely normal for
parents to hit their kids,” a Chinese official said, justifying physical abuses of athletes at
the hand of their Chinese coaches who “treat their players like their children.”
434
Such is
the protocol governing the parent-child relation.

From a domestic polity point of view, Jiang’s rage at the rally can be construed as that
of a patriarch seeing his children/subordinates act out of bounds: Without permission they
came to play at the parents’ master chamber and in so doing overturned the rule of the
house. In the first place, the Zhongnanhai mass rally signaled an act of indiscretion of the
207
“unworthy” who had the temerity to be “louder than their worth would warrant, by acting
in such a way as to be noticed,” showing themselves as uninhibited, impolite,
over-familiar, too casual, disorderly, and talkative. By disturbing the “ordered
arrangement of situations in which they are involved,” they “let themselves go,” and
forget that the “father” is supposedly the “principle of cohesion in the family, the one
who establishes the link to an origin.”
435
Secondly, crossing into the private quarters of
the parents without prior notification amounts to staking claims to an economy of worth
not dependable on one’s rank in the house, that one’s worth can be measured in terms of
individual merit or something else. We have to remember “obeisance” and “loyalty” are
the supreme virtues in a domestic polity, not “individuality,” “audacity,” “stamina,”
“bravery,” etc. “Wake up! It was Zhongnanhai!” exclaimed one Taiwanese TV
commentator equally adherent to Confucian paternalism. He then added, “We all
understand that the shame of the family is supposed to be kept within the family,”
implying that public protest brings “shame” onto the leadership/parent.
436
Those who
commit the crime of insubordination not only violate the hierarchical order centered on
the Father figure but expose the vulnerability of the “house” to the outside world. As
Boltanski and Thevenot comment, “If you are not in agreement with your superior and if
he maintains his position, do not criticize him outside…This would betray his trust.”
Betrayal is more dangerous a sin than indiscretion, because “making his independence
known on the outside … undermines the unity of the house and thus makes it
vulnerable.”
437
Publicizing one’s defiance is an effrontery more intolerable than
208
expressing grudges within the family – this is precisely the logic that the Party abides by.
Deploring the sit-in as a “face-loss” for the Party whose “image was tarnished,” Jiang
writes in his memo on the day of the rally, “The hostile Western powers are now
gleefully jumping up and down, blowing it (the mass protest) out of proportion (Dazuo
Wenzhang). They always want to turn us into a butt of laughter (kan xiao hua)”
438
The
CCP would not have an (imagined) insult such as this slip by easily. Reprisals soon began
as the CCP vowed to reclaim the “lost honor” and to teach the traitors a lesson they
deserved.

Drawing the Boundary: Embracing the Prodigal Sons and Expelling the Baddies

“The honnete homme,” Auerbach remarks, “is esteemed for never “(pretending) to be
what he is not.”
439
To this observation add Boltansky and Thevenot, “To know one’s
rank is to know one’s worth,” and to aspire to “what he is not,” is an act of pretense, a
“mark of madness.”
440
In the anti-Falun Gong campaign, the government literally made
obedience a test of sanity: Those willing to return to the fold and “regain their good
senses” were considered “salvageable;” as the returning prodigal sons and daughters, they
were to be welcome back into the house. Conversely, the unrepentant hardcore would
face excommunication in “transformation camp,” jail, or literally, mental institutions,
bearing out the full import of “sanity” test.
441

209
In accordance with CCP’s political practice, Jiang in his speech to the Politburo
directed that the state policy should separate the hardcore leaders of Falun Gong from the
throng of mere followers, and isolate the active propagators from those being
“unfortunately led astray.”
442
People’s Daily’s July 22 editorial issued a piece titled
“Evaluating understanding” which was regarded the most authoritative exegesis of the
central committee’s notice on the Falun Gong ban. In it, besides “underscoring the
superstitious nature of Falun Gong teachings (and) the gravity of its political challenge”
to the regime, it made the point that “we need to differentiate the great majority of Falun
Gong followers who practiced the exercises for health reasons from the small minority of
its leaders who planned and organized political activities.” The same editorial encouraged
“voluntary compliance” with the ban, “that Falun Gong assemblies take action to dissolve
themselves and practitioners turn themselves in to register with authorities, declare their
severance from the sect and bring along Falun Gong publications, pictorials, and
accessories before July 28” to be incinerated in a public bon fire. The stray children could
have another chance, the rationale went, as long as they re-pledge their previously
misplaced allegiance to their rightful Father/King and the King’s God and resubmit
themselves to the chain of dependence requisite to a functional domestic polity.
Apparently the ban was not worded in a legal framework; rather, it targeted attitude and
consciousness more than behavior. Whereas a civic polity emphasizes legality, what are
considered of value in a domestic polity are loyalty, obedience and subordination. The
“rituals of return” hence became a routine practice in China for judicial workers handling
210
Falun Gong practitioners: Switch your allegiance from Li Hongzhi to me and sign a
repentance/pledge, and then we are fine. Otherwise, the king has no qualms of devouring
his own children.
443

Orchestrated official media reportage soon emerged detailing the public renunciation
and denunciation of Falun Gong by those who had the good sense to deflect to the good
camp. China’s CCTV depicted how some of the “top leaders” of Falun Gong in Jilin and
Hainan province “severed their ties from Falun Gong” and came forward to express
regret over their gullibility. For instance, Xu Xiaohua, a deputy chief of Falun Gong
station from Yunan, “submit her confession” after “several days of self examination” in
an isolated “re-education” center.
444
Political author Zong Hairen also recorded with
irony how coercive measures were implemented to help propel “voluntary renunciation
and confession.”
445
By his count, on July 20, 1999 alone, one day and half before the ban
was officially implemented, as a prelude to the ban, Chinese authorities arrested 5600
practitioners. The majority of them were released after penning a repentant statement and
pledge to withdraw from Falun Gong.
446
The whole scene was evocative of what could
have happened at a school principle’s office to wayward teenagers: admit your mistake to
the teacher and parent, and after a slap on the wrist you may go free.

The differential treatments for “the diehard” -- to be prosecuted and persecuted as
“enemies of the state”-- and “the corrigible” – to be exonerated of political and criminal
211
onuses and reinstated in the community – was characteristic of domestic polity. In Chen
Zixiu, an elderly woman whose story reported by Wall Street Journal’s Ian Johnson in his
Pulitzer Price winning piece, we can find a quintessential “lost child” whose notable
“stubbornness” of refusing to be brought into line escalated what had been “domestic
friction” into criminality, eventually leading to her own demise. Ian Johnson
reconstructed the scene as follows: Chen, a retired grandma from Shandong Province,
received “visits” by her local Party district chief and other officials after her first protest
in Beijing. She let them in, ushering them to the “most comfortable place to sit” in the
house – a symbolic gesture of turning over one’s place to the higher-ups, while she
herself “dragged out” a kitchen stool, sat down facing the local Party chief “like a
naughty child facing a school discipline board.” The local cadres went at length at how
lenient they were to her, only levying a minor fine for her protest in Beijing. The protest
itself, likened by them to disobeying children “making a scene,” was “embarrassing” to
the town chiefs, and “embarrassing the hometown” as well. At the end of the disciplinary
session, as an apparent endearing gesture, “the lady from the street committee” gave
Chen “a big smile” and concluded, “We’re all one big family. Let’s not upset things.”
Chen, in return, offered no “guarantee to anyone” that she would not go to Beijing to
protest again. At Chen’s recalcitrance, one official stood up, towering over Chen, and
started to roar: “So far, the government has treated Falun Gong practitioners like
wayward children. But discipline can involve harshness. Think about what your attitude
means!”
447
Those harsh words soon became real in Chen’s case. Days after she returned
212
from her second protesting trip to Beijing, she was thrown into county jail and tortured to
death. Her story illustrated the dominant principle of domestic polity: as far as
insubordination of the inferiors goes, what at issue has little to do with criminality or
legality, but everything to do with loyalty and obeisance to authorities.

Propaganda Posters: Reconstructing Father’s Authority, the Ideal Youth,
Harmonious Families, and the Power of Science

After cleaning the house of misbehaving children, it is incumbent upon the government
to reconstruct and reinforce its paternalistic authority. Next, I will analyze two
propaganda posters which exemplify the merging of the state apparatus, paternalistic
politics, official religion a la science, and the interpellation to the audience situated as
“children.”

The major order of domestic polity is established between the “more worthy beings”
including “Father, King, Ancestors, Parents, Grownups, Leader and Boss,” and the “less
worthy” ones consisting of “children, servants, and subjects.”
448
Of them, “children” is
the epitome of the inferior, those without autonomy but owe everything – survival,
sustenance, identity – to their superiors. By the same token, it is only natural for the
Chinese leadership to position itself in the role of a patriarch, and belittle the citizenry as
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a group of “juveniles,” which, as it happened, constituted the ideal audience position in
the anti-Falun Gong campaign. Youth’s vulnerability and lack of agency were depicted as
inviting the protection of parents, teachers, and the Party who were to “arm the
susceptible youngsters with truth” and “to drive away fallacies and superstitions.” Since
science is considered one of the divine sources and the ground of legitimacy for the
Chinese regime, one of the first tasks was for the Chinese youth to be realigned with
science. Note that the science represented in the government story was Science proper,
a politicized and positivistic version embodied only in empirical findings and
technological inventions, having little to do with the revised and expanded understanding
of science championed by “Qigong scientists” (discussed in Chapter 3). In the campaign,
two posters featuring the youth and science theme achieved iconic status.

214

Poster 1: The caption reads “Uphold Science, Eradicate Superstition”
449

Poster 1: Science, a Politicized Tool to Interpellate Youth as the Ideal Audience

The overall color scheme of Poster 1 is that of purplish blue, the color of a starry night.
To the right of the frame, a teenager girl’s head is floating in space, indicating that the
scene is occurring in her dream at night. Since her eyes are wide open, looking longingly
upward into the horizon, one can assume that “dream” is synonymous with “longing,”
“hope,” and “aspiration” – the metaphorical “dream” to be realized. “Dream” implies
future, and the future tense in which the female child is inscribed is consistent with the
official lines depicting youth as “the future of the country.” Since everything depends on
215
how our youth should turn out, the dream of one youth is inseparable from the prospect
of China. Then the question begs to be asked: What kind of a dream is it? It is a Science
dream, a futuristic space fantasy situated at a distinct historical juncture making a
statement predicating the realization of the Chinese science dream on the successful
dispel of “superstition.” Science in this context is figured at its most advanced, i.e. space
science, and pitted against the lowly form of “feudalistic beliefs and superstitions”
represented by Falun Gong. The poster is a reenactment of China’s “techno-nationalism”
myth which considers science to be an instrument of national salvation and progress, the
major hindrance of which is “superstition.”
450
Moreover, from the perspectives of the
official propagandists, space science is the most powerful cudgel against superstition as
astronauts have reportedly said that they “see no God up here.”
451

The poster employs a progressive rhetoric which projects a temporal distance between
the backward “feudal past” (infested by superstitious beliefs) and the modernistic future.
The temporal distance, along with the Manichean dichotomy between science and
superstition, is mirrored and pictorially reinforced by the spatial layout in the poster:
things having to do with the “remote,” the “distant,” and the “future” are seated in the
upstage area, fading into the space, whereas “the earth,” the “present” and the “here and
now” are lodged in the more accessible downstage region, serving as the foundation. The
gap between the space and the earth, the rising missiles, and the girl’s upbound head
trailed by exhume-like hair suggest a “take-off” metaphor which entails “overcoming”
216
the downward pull of the earth and the counterproductive superstitious beliefs. The
celestial object in the upper west corner of the frame is where everything and everyone is
taking off to.

This poster is suggestive of a few layers of meanings. China’s space program, like that
of the former Soviet Union’s, was conceived in the midst of military competition during
the Cold War. Gradually, it became a symbol of China’s technological clout and national
strength. In the same year Falun Gong was banned, China launched the Shenzhou 1
spacecraft as a “gift” for the People’s Republic’s 50
th
birthday. Since then, China has
prided itself to be the third country after US and Russia to have successfully sent
astronauts into the space aboard a space shuttle, and is contemplating the possibility of
moon-landing within a decade. All this, as the propaganda refrain has it (astronauts have
made it a ritual to thank Party’s sponsorship before boarding the vehicle and upon
returning from outer space), “could not possibly have been achieved without the
leadership of the Party.” The whole picture is themed on “take-off:” the “take-off” of
China’s space program and the “take-off” of China as a technological superpower under
the auspice of the Party. If the Party is lauded to be the source of power and productivity
for the Chinese polity, in the picture the moon-like object, being usually bright and large,
serves a similar function as the source of light and the focal point all eyes are on. Indeed,
the moon is suspiciously over-bright, almost suggestive of the sun, with orbiting planets
in their tracks. By insinuating a sun-like object in the central position of the frame, the
217
poster hints at an ingrained metaphor (most frequently seen in the Mao era movies and
songs) which compares the Party to the sun, the source of energy for lives on earth. At
the same time, the celestial object and its surrounding planets can be seen as a rough
replica of the Chinese national flag which similarly places the Party at the center,
surrounded by its political allies. In fact, the very centrality of the celestial object recalls
how the Party has been customarily abbreviated as “the Centre.” The Centre guides and
gathers the other symbols and icons in the poster as the source of motivation and the
destination to be reached. Also, the fact that the space shuttles and the Chinese youth
orient themselves toward the Centre illuminates a gesture of respect and admiration, as if
to confirm the leadership’s accomplishment in launching China onto the track of
modernity so that everyone is able to collectively inhabit the dream of powerful
nation-building on the basis of science and technology. Youth, representing future and
hope, need to prepare themselves for a dream of science and modernity under the
guidance of the Centre. In the meantime, youth need protection and support from the
Centre in discerning “true science” from “pseudo-science” (superstition). Although the
girl, as the dreamer, is the subject of the picture, the world seen through her eyes, she is at
the same time a listener receiving a lecture on the benefits of science and the deleterious
effects of superstition – she was granted a dream full of opportunities as she was
summoned by the Centre which wears multiple hats as a leader, teacher, guardian and
witch-hunter. The girl in the poster is a stand-in for the ideal audience of
citizenry-con-children who absorbs and internalizes the hegemonic messages from the
218
Centre. The whole structure of center-periphery, upstage-downstage reproduces the
unilateral communication manner the Chinese leadership is notorious for when it has a
forceful message to deliver.

Poster 2: The caption reads “Firmly Support the Decision of the Central Committee of the
Party to Ban the Illegal Organization of 'Falun Gong' ”
452

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Poster 2: A Statement about Material Progress, Familial Harmony and Paternalistic
Authority

If the political message of the first poster is implicit, in the second it is out in the face.

As most Chinese can recognize, the scene in the poster takes place in the Great Hall of
the People, the cavernous auditorium where China’s National People’s Congress (the
Chinese equivalent of a legislature) and the Party’s Congress convene annually. Far in the
horizon, outside the window of the auditorium, is a modern urban landscape punctuated
by chic and glossy skyscrapers which contextualizes the event in the auditorium—“China
on the fast track of modernity.” Here, “science” is no longer represented by space science,
but materialized in progress and prosperity. In the auditorium, high up in the center of its
dome sits the red star, a signage explicitly designed to refer to the Party, overlooking the
world underneath. In the back rows are seated China’s ethnic folks (from Tibet, Xinjiang,
etc) in full festive regalia, applauding, bearing flowers, beaming happily, a very paragon
of national unity (considering China has its own share of ethnic conflicts). In the front
seat is a nuclear family composed of “father, mother, me.” The young girl has her
Communist Pioneer Red Scarf on, indicative of the significance of the situation which
calls for her to display her Communist Pioneer identity. She is supported by her parents
in civilian clothing, plus a uniformed man from the army. The PLA soldier stands next to
the father like his body-double (they even look alike). By inserting a state apparatus into
220
the family, it seems to suggest that the ordinary family’ interest is high on the agenda of
the government which makes sure it is well-protected (or penetrated, depending on one’s
view), its boundary reinforced against outside pests and vermin. The big red banner hung
in the back of the auditorium reads, “We Rally around the Party Headed by Comrade
Jiang Zemin [in support of his wise decision to eliminate Falun Gong].” Everyone in the
audience is paying tribute to someone outside the poster frame, which implies that Jiang
and his colleagues are mounting the stage as the audience put their hands together --
which is how China’s political theatre is usually choreographed. The poster caption
echoes the message in the banner: “[We] Firmly Stand by the Decision of the Communist
Party to Ban the Illegal Organization of Falun Gong.”

On the surface, the poster displays a utopian picture showcasing the so-called “popular
support” for the regime’s repression of one group. In return, the society is awarded with
familial harmony, protection, modernity, material abundance, ethnic stability, and a
projected smooth upbringing of our youth. Considering Jiang and his colleagues’
grandparent-like age, this propaganda poster makes an implicit reference to
intergenerational harmony—a highly valued blessing for Chinese families. With the
troublesome “them” being ousted, “we” could enjoy our happiness. Turn one group’s
tragedy into another’s bliss: Should one want to replace “Falun Gong” with “Jews,” and
“the Chinese Communist Party” with “the Nazi Party,” one wouldn’t have to bother
changing the poster setup.
221
Over the past 30 years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been using a
performance-based logic to justify its leadership, arguing that China’s growing wealth
and power have demonstrated the “historical determinacy” that the CCP is China’s
destined leader. “Only the Communist Party can deliver China to a glorious future and
only the Communist Party can keep the Chinese society in harmony.” It is by the grace of
the Party that the Chinese society is at where it is. “[T]he king, the father is the one who
lifts beings up by means of the dependence in which he holds them and who thus gives
them access to all the worth they are capable of achieving.”
453
Consequently, by the
same token, whoever “against the Party” is committing no less than a crime of against the
value system the society is built upon and against “the Chinese people” who thrive on the
valuables granted by the Father/King. That “the anti-China Western forces and its puppet
such as Falun Gong,” denounced an editorial in People’s Daily, “have the temerity of
challenging the Chinese Communist Party and socialism” is because of jealousy, because
of their “ill-intent of jeopardizing the hard-won social stability and the good life we have
achieved.”
454
Just like this, the anti-Falun Gong campaign experienced a tonality shift
from its earlier days: “Orthodoxy,” “Marxism” and “Party loyalty” were no longer
employed as devices to combat “heterodoxy,” to restore the order and to regroup the
straying and dissenting voices. When these persuasive constructs failed to deliver the
coveted effect, the propaganda machine switched gears to highlighting the importance of
science, secular wellbeing, familial harmony, social stability and material abundance. A
religio-political order (focused on the purity of doctrines and membership) was starting to
222
give way to an orientation toward domestic polity and social progress. Falun Gong was
no longer featured as a challenger to the Party-as-religious-leader and its holy doctrines,
but as a saboteur of wealth, stability and good fortunes bestowed by Party-the-father upon
its children. This tonal shift was characterized by a “secularism,” broadening its appeal
from only addressing those ideologically committed to Marxism to speaking to the
ordinary masses organized in units of family and primarily concerned with material gains.
People’s Daily editorial explicitly charged Falun Gong as “anti-progress:” “Falun Gong
fundamentally denies the progressive tendency of human history, denies the tremendous
accomplishments China has attained in the two decades of reform and opening-up, and
denies the significant changes and progress of the Chinese people’s ideological and
mental outlook.”
455

True to the nature of a God-term, “Science” as a signifier was elastic and housed
changeable referents. During the campaign, the construct of “Science” was once
employed as a synonym for Marxism, and later served to highlight “material prosperity,”
“modernity” and “progress” -- hard-won gems supposedly in need of protection and
accomplishments supposedly achieved under the leadership of the Party. Thus set up,
protecting the integrity of “science” also entailed guarding the political structure allowing
China’s economic miracle to happen. By making “Science” (instead of Marxism) a moral
ideal, the choice the Chinese populace had to make was no longer between “the Party”
and “Falun Gong” but between “dark times,” “feudal backwardness” and “modernity and
223
progress.” “Science” seemed to have the ability to “de-politicize” (no longer a war
between the Party-state and Falun Gong) and “de-religion-ize” (no longer a religious war
between Marxism and theism) the propaganda rhetoric. Family, in this case, represented
the social unit benefiting from science and modernity; it also pertained to a lifestyle
primarily concerned with and thrived on earthly, material blessings (as opposed to
transcendental, religious pursuits). The supposed vulnerability of “family” and “children”
makes it a more urgent call to fortify the boundary and keep the trouble-makers out.

Father Knows Best

In an interview regarding the mass detention of Falun Gong practitioners, a Chinese
state official thus recounted his motive: “We arrest them to save their souls.”
456
Indeed,
that was an official line played over and over again to the family members of the Falun
Gong practitioners: “Send in your muddle-headed loved ones who refuse to recant, so
that we can clean them and clear them.” In this outrageous rationale we find the
combined motives of playing God and playing father.

The Party-state is good at tearing up the existent family structure and take over the
role of the parents. The propaganda rhetoric first of all questioned the credibility of
resistant Falun Gong followers by depicting them as “once good family men now
brainwashed into idiots,” who are “possessed to protest to the central government, to the
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detriment of their own families.” With the collapse of the father’s authority, the state
stepped in as an ersatz parent. Wang Bo, a 20-year-old music student, worked with the
police to lure her father -- then fleeing from police arrest -- back home. Her motive was
simple: “They (the police) seemed nice…I was concerned about my father -- I thought I
was helping him [by working with the police].”
457
Li Bin, a 39-year-old woman now
living in Rowland Heights, CA, told me that it was her mother who turned her in to
authorities so she could be “straightened.”
458
To develop its political-moral authority, the
state used a “soft-knife” procedure to drive a wedge into what are supposedly the most
sacred relationships – the affectionate bonds between family members.

It is a common tactic among prison guards specialized in “re-educating” Falun Gong
followers to adopt a fatherly tone and use family as leverage to “transform” Falun Gong
followers. “Look at your gray-haired mom,” they would cajole. “She is down on her
kneels to beg you to give up Falun Gong. Once you relinquish and sign this repentance
sheet, you can go home with her. What an un-filial daughter you would be to only be
mindful of your own principles and beliefs! Where is your ‘compassion’ in being so
ruthless to your own mother?”
459
Sometimes, prison guards would invoke their own
family’s welfare to berate the “heartlessness” of recalcitrant Falun Gong followers. “You
know the outcome of if I cannot finish my quota [of transforming Falun Gong
followers]-- It means I would be stuck with you for days on end and cannot go home!”
The prison guards would sometimes use an imploring tone: “Look, we are implicated
225
against our own will, but it is our job. Why don’t you show us a little mercy by letting us
go home for the New Year holiday? Your refusal to repent not only costs your family a
fortune but costs us our bonuses. If you do not care about yourself and your own family,
we still have a family to consider.”
460
Again, victims are distorted into villains and the
victimizers become the victims.

Falun Gong’s Guilt and Counterclaims

The production of guilt is founded on shared assumptions about order, that the “rebels”
consent to the sacredness of the order and acknowledge their involvement in breaking it.
That’s how the establishment succeeds eliciting guilt in those who have defied or
challenged the order and uses their remorse as an effective control strategy.
The religio-political order that CCP identified as breached and urged its members to be
re-aligned with is premised on the notion of “religious/ideological exclusiveness” which
holds an intolerant perspective on truth claims outside of its range. By contrast, Falun
Gong followers subscribed to a “pluralism” which did not accept the concocted
“either/or” option imposed by authorities. Indeed, followers of Falun Gong did not
employ “religion” as a lens to examine Falun Gong or CCP; they prefer other labels. One
Falun Gong practitioner, citing Li Hongzhi, suggests that Falun Gong never claims to be
a religion.
461
To some followers Falun Gong remains a set of moral teachings, and to
others, a healing practice, while the Chinese version of Marxism championed by CCP
226
nothing but a shell people have to live with. In all, for the majority of Falun Gong
followers during the early years of anti-Falun Gong crusade, characterizing Falun Gong
as a religious contender/competitor was an inconceivable concept. As a matter of fact,
even though in a hypothetical scenario Falun Gong did achieve the same status as Taoism,
Buddhism and Confucianism in China – formal, institutionalized religions they are, there
would be little unease for the same individual to embrace several traditions at once, as
amply demonstrated by historical precedents in which Confucian scholars were also
Buddhist or Taoist. Julia Ching has offered a great example of the non-exclusive aspect
of Far Eastern religions. She writes, “If you ask a Japanese, for instance, whether he or
she is a believer in a particular religion, you may get the answer ‘no.’… However, if you
ask whether he or she adheres to Shinto, Buddhism, and Confucianism, you may get the
answer ‘yes’. Many Japanese follow more than one religion, even though they do not
consider themselves very religious.”
462
Julia Ching’s example has helped demonstrate
the irrelevance of the concept of religious absolutism promoted by CCP: Falun Gong
practitioners (who happened to be Marxist at the same time) did not recognize their
involvement in Falun Gong as an act of religious/ideological violation, let alone a
religiously motivated political conspiracy. The charge of “heresy” and “heterodoxy”
failed to engender much guilt on their part. It was on the front of domestic polity -- where
the invocation of “transgression” and “guilt” was partially successful -- that the
government’s accusation of “violation” did strike a chord with the “insubordinate
children.”
227
Addressing how one’s house confers identity to the individual susceptible to domestic
polity, Claverie and Lamaison write that “ Each one moves around under a halo
constituted by the history of his rank, his family, his patrimonial lineage, the space, time
and memory occupied in the village by his…household. His house is a second skin, and
even if he has the opportunity to prove his strength as an individual, he ultimately
remains defined by his rank or his family status. Without his family, he is nothing.”
463

Before the state entirely alienated the Falun Gong movement, its members moved within
the same world of domestic polity and subscribed to its principles. If a gap of some sort
emerged in the mass rally near the government compound, it was incumbent upon those
engaged in the rally to explain that the domestic order they equally upheld was not
disrupted, which was precisely what Falun Gong did.

During the first couple of years of the crackdown, Falun Gong’s attitude was one of
misunderstood children imploring their parents to hear them out. Instead of interpreting
the mass rally as an act of transgression, Falun Gong followers regarded the 4/25 event as
an expression of faith in and trust for the government who was expected to address
people’s grievances and restore the family to its previous tranquil state. It was “your” rule
and regulation which “permitted us to express our opinions through visiting the State
Council Appeals Office” located at Zhongnanhai, the central leadership compound, when
“our belief is denigrated by the official media.”
464
By going there, we were merely
endorsing you as the rightful ruler and a capable agent of change. Not only did the Falun
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Gong practitioners describe their motive as children seeking help through rightful means,
but they insisted that petitioners were observing the appropriate protocols, just like
children on their best behavior. Practitioners merely had a “quiet” and “peaceful”
sit-down, with “no shouting of slogans” or “waving of placards.”
465
They conducted
themselves with discipline, self-restraint and rationality by reducing public disturbance, if
any, to the minimum. One participant thus described their behaviors on the rally day:

We stood on the pavement along one side of the street and left the other side for
passersby. Not a single traffic jam happened. No trash was left on the ground. Only the
most self-disciplined people could do that. …Many called out words of praise in
admiration and support. The police were nervous at first, but relaxed after seeing us so
peaceful and quiet.
466

Indeed, the rally participants wanted to be seen as bearing good will, respectful of
public order and the leadership, and trustworthy. “They clapped enthusiastically” when
the then premier stepped out to have a meeting with some Falun Gong delegates; upon
knowing that their request would be met, “they left quietly of their own accord at
8:30pm.”
467
In characterizing the event, Falun Gong refused to adopt “demonstration” or
“protest” – loaded terms smacking of confrontation and conspiracy in the Chinese context,
and hence “dirty words” in Chinese politics.
468
The choice term for them to designate
the rally is “petition,” which suggests emotional piety and humility: we are merely
229
beseeching you to grant us mercy, and we recognize the status difference and consent to
the power hierarchy encompassing the superiors (father) and the inferiors (children). In
order to contain the mess within the family, the “children” took extra caution at the rally
to draw a boundary and keep “outsiders” uninvolved. As one Chinese official once put it,
“There is a lot of tension within a family but nobody should ever seek to expose those
problems to the outside world.”
469
In a domestic polity, insulting your parents in front of
strangers amounts to not just effrontery but betrayal of the order the polity is built upon.
Therefore, at the rally, Western reporters – those “meddling foreigners” -- often found
their interview requests rejected by the rally participants. It led one AFP journalist ask
curiously, “What kind of a protest is it without wanting to inform others of your motive?”
Ian Johnson, visiting the scene, discovered the reason behind rally participants guarding
their tongue, as one of them thus explained, “We don’t want to say anything…You
cannot solve our problem, only the government can do this. Therefore, we want to talk
only to the government.”
470
Rally participants further hinted that speaking to a Western
correspondent such as Johnson would get them and their cause into trouble, a sentiment
concurred by Forbes’ John Garnaut. According to Garnaut, because overall the Chinese
are afraid of being seen as “betraying the system by going to the Western news media
with their protest rather than trusting the issue would be solved by the Chinese
government,” the Chinese normally would not want to open to Western reporters unless
the “situation is really serious.”
471

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The children’s petition in the form of a mass rally apparently did not achieve its
intended effect. Enraged, the parents turned out to be not benevolent but ruthless, setting
out to crack down on the unruly children. Continuing in the tradition of domestic polity,
the first reaction by Falun Gong practitioners was one of disbelief, shock, bewilderment
and hurt.
472
Many practitioners recalled that they couldn’t believe what was happening to
them nor did they ever expect the persecution to last so long. Feeling like spurned
children, they thought that “the persecution must have been the result of a
misunderstanding. How could a government turn onto its own supporters?”
473
Quite a
few felt disowned and rendered adrift. One Falun Gong disciple who was also a retired
Party official thus expressed his pain of alienation: “Falun Gong cultivators are
distributed in all walks of life, including the Party, the government, and the military. Over
the decades, we have been raised by the Party, we owe our livelihoods to the Party, and
we have profound feelings for the Party. It is inconceivable the Party should want to turn
us out.”
474
Even the Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi once asked in bewildered anger,
“What on earth has happened to ‘the leaders of my beloved land’?”
475

.
Political scientist Elizabeth Perry has noted what she calls a “reciprocal linkage”
between the leader and the led, that the Chinese “protestors remain unusually attentive to
signals from the central leadership,” wanting official approval as ground of legitimacy.
476

Furthering Perry’s line of reasoning, I view the reciprocity as having sprung from a
distinct domestic polity governing Chinese political life – children (protestors) would
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usually not want to overthrow the parents but seek redefinition of appropriate parenthood.
In retrospect, the Chinese state missed out on what could have been a moment of
reconciliation based on mutual agreement to the holiness of family. Granted, the
government’s authority was partially shaken in the mass rally, which called for a review
of the respective duties and responsibilities of the parties involved, but the pre-existing
hierarchical relations remained intact. The state could have proceeded to re-consolidate
its paternalistic power without exacting a tremendous cost.

The key dispute between the Party state and Falun Gong was over the extent of the
ruler’s reign: How “absolute” was the patriarch’s rule? Under what circumstance could it
be subject to a healthy dose of criticism? In On Justification, Boltanski and Thevenot
remind us that although the sovereignty of the King is “absolute,” it is still subject to a
(non-binding) contract with the people. They prescribe that for a domestic polity to
function, the transaction between King and his subjects should be mutual. The sovereign
who has the preeminence of a father is bound by his conscience; he “must be good” and
“virtuous:”

But the only justification for the existence of the great – the worthy – lies in their
determination to ‘protect the small.’ Bossuet repeatedly underscores the relationship
between worth and the protection of the weak: ‘All strength is transferred to the
sovereign magistrate: everyone strengthens him to the prejudice of his own, and
232
renounces his own life in case of disobedience. The people gain by this; for they
recover in the person of the supreme magistrate more strength than they yielded for his
authority’ … The father-prince is the champion of the weak. …That ‘The fatherly
monarch must provide for the people and the obligation to take care of the people’ is
the basis of all rights that sovereign have over subjects
477

Only on the condition that the “fatherly prince” is willing to sacrifice his own interest for
the sake of the people, a smooth interchange can operate where “On the one hand, there
are the bounden duties of reverence, assistance, service, obedience, and dependence, and
on the other, the indispensable obligations of goodness, justice, and protection.”
478

The “good prince” argument is what Falun Gong practitioners employed to beseech
the authorities to reexamine their behaviors and fulfill their duties to the people, for a
prince is only as good as his sacrifice and love for those dependent on him. Some Falun
Gong members who were also government officials asked rhetorically, “Isn’t the Party’s
mission founded on caring for the people and solving their sufferings? Why crack down
on something the people need for health and well-being?”
479
Li Hongzhi also chimed in:
“Cultivators whose hearts have turned toward goodness and whose morals have improved
are good for any country.”
480
Now that the people have already done their duty of
assistance and service to the prince, how is the prince reacting?

233
For a significant period of time, the Falun Gong side invoked the values and principles
underlying a domestic polity and hoped that by making co-substance-based appeal, a
middle point between state and society --- both of whom supported the same domestic
order -- could be reached. As the “fatherly prince” refused to uphold his end of the deal,
that is, to care, to protect, and to trust, but was overly obsessed with the “blunders of the
children,” the relationship between the movement and the state soured, bound for an
inevitable collision. The pact was broken, and confrontation began.

Conclusion

How rhetors mobilize topoi provides access to their underlying motives. To establish
Falun Gong’s legitimacy, the movement participants laid claim to the constructive topoi
of “health” and “science” while keeping distance from the negative and controversial
ones of “superstition” and “politics” (by staying nominally apolitical). When the
government wanted to make Falun Gong a matter of dispute, to quench a potential
uprising and to reinforce its authority, it reshuffled the topical arrangement and animated
the castigating and controversial ones. Hence, Falun Gong was redefined as a regime
challenger and a superstitious sect. “Politics” as a linguistic entity was once invisible and
unmarked in public discussions as the movement wanted to stay “apolitical;” now, it was
pushed onboard by propaganda discourse solely for the purpose of condemning and
intimidating “meddlers” of the status quo.
234
I started this chapter with the assumption that disruptive events shake up the previous
state of affair and expose the embedded “orders” through responsive measures
undertaken to address the problem. In the development of Falun Gong, the 4/25 mass
rally marked a significant turning point, putting an end to Falun Gong’s peaceful
co-habitance with the regime and ushering in a period of crisis. Two “orders” have been
identified as having been “disturbed” and in need of redress, i.e. the religio-political order
and the domestic polity. The identification of these two orders illustrates that “religion”
and “family” factor in the political rule of the regime, offering insights into how a
political system understands itself.

Despite its atheistic and modernistic claim, when ideologically challenged, the Chinese
Communist Party fell back on Marxism and scientism with a semi-religious zeal and
perceived a political threat as having originated from the power of the “heresy” the
movement promulgated. In the Party’s logic, it was not a simple uprising, but a
religious/ideological competition aimed at undermining the “partocracy.” The same
mentality wanted to re-align the citizenry to the “correct thinking” of Marxism and
science -- which was never a perfunctory call at that time but to be enforced with
earnestness and urgency – and prioritized religio-political means to repair the order. In
reacting against an opponent and challenger, the Party receded into its old fundamentalist
self and hung onto doctrinal purity as the cornerstone of its rule. The uncovery of
“family” as a major rhetorical construct is of particular significance to me as it frames the
235
dispute in terms of paternalistic politics. Not necessarily having the ability to “soften” the
Party’s absolutist stance,
481
the appearance of “family” nevertheless sheds light on a
moment when an ostensibly contentious movement actually once identified with the
regime in power. At least theoretically, this moment promised an opportunity to resolve a
deadlocked conflict by resorting to a common denominator. Viewing the Falun Gong
issue through the lens of domestic polity could also account for the initial lack of
civic-flavored discourses released by the Falun Gong side: Rarely did I hear people frame
the conflict as pertaining to “civil rights” in the first few years of the ban; on the contrary,
“family dispute” and “misunderstanding by our leaders” had the lion share of the
arguments, which subsequently inspired endeavors to “win over the heart of the Party”
through “demonstrating our goodness.” Organizing the state vs. society dynamics by way
of domestic order again substantiates a thesis some China scholars have proposed, that
the boundary between Chinese state and society is never clear, generating
“semi-official/semi-civic” groups “occupying a position between subjects and citizens.”

482

Historical constraints notwithstanding, Falun Gong’s April 25 mass rally at
Zhognnanhai remains an event of great importance to China’s political life. It put an end
to the decade-long civil society inertia following the 1989 Tiananmen protests; it ushered
in a period characterized by local activism and specific requests -- rights to practice Falun
Gong, workers’ rights, rights to fair compensation in cases of land expropriation, etc --
236
instead of demands of macro structural changes; it catapulted an obscure movement to
the global stage which till this day has remained one of Beijing’s most vocal criticizers.
237
Chapter Six
A “Cult” Story: Self-Immolation and the Loss of Agent-Hood

One year and half after 4/25, the conflict triggered in the mass rally showed no sign of
abating. On the contrary, tensions were escalating when the government found that
disciplining, detention and imprisonment had failed to achieve the desired result. This
chapter addresses another critical moment in the development of the conflict between
Falun Gong and the Chinese state: the so-called self-immolation incident. Periodically,
the incident marked a climax in terms of propaganda strategy and campaign intensity.
Structurally, in the aftermath of “self-immolation” the movement and the Chinese state
reached a stage of impasse, a non-solution which has continued to this day. It has been
noted that alternative religious movements often suffer from legitimacy dispute due to
their unorthodox doctrines or competition with the mainstream for control over symbols
and membership.
483
Last chapter deals with the status quo de-legitimizing the movement
along the lines of religio-political order and domestic polity (Falun Gong being an
ideological contender and an insubordinate subject). In it, I argued that the attempt to
reclaim the “violated” order revealed what was at stake for the Chinese Party-state, i.e.
ideological hegemony and paternalistic authority. In this chapter the alienation effort at
work was of a different character: Falun Gong was recast not as an enemy of the state but
a threat to Chinese society at large, hurting the body politic by hurting health and family.
Doing so allowed the propaganda rhetoric to assume a less explicitly political tone and
238
appeal to a broader audience base. By touching on the issues of health and family, the
state discourse made itself more germane to the popular concerns.

Falun Gong’s alleged “self-immolation” exists first and foremost as a heavily mediated
event – in fact, some would contend that due to the lack of first-hand witnesses, it exists
as nothing but a media event, a simulacra ten times bigger than reality itself.
484
On Jan
23, 2001, on the eve of the Chinese New Year, five men and women were said to set
themselves on fire at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Against their usual practice, the
official Xinhua news agency released the news – in English instead of Chinese – within
two hours, claiming these individuals to be Falun Gong followers. One week later, a
video – to be relentlessly looped for one entire month on primetime TV – was put
together by the state-owned CCTV as the eye-witness account of the “truth” of the story.
The video footages contain the blurry images of a 36-year-old woman struggling in
smoke before finally collapsing to her death, the charred body of her 12-year-old
daughter, the “organizer of this crime” Mr. Wang Jindong sitting cross-legged at the
Tiananmen Square, the inside-hospital interviews of another mother/daughter pair, both
musicians, and a 54-year-old defector who reportedly failed to light herself on spot but
showed up for TV testimony afterwards. Also included in the footage are in-depth
investigative reports on the motives of the burning, witness testimonies on how “cult
brainwashed normal citizens and paralyzed functional families,” and impassioned
denouncements and tearful cries from bereaved families and friends.
239
This self-immolation event was thoroughly exploited by the official media which in the
following months saturated China’s TV space with gruesome images and the child’s
charred body and heart-breaking cry. The visuals were so graphic and compelling that the
majority of domestic audience found themselves no longer able to sympathize with Falun
Gong. One Chinese interviewee bluntly told NPR, “If they burned themselves, it must be
a cult.”
485
His view was echoed by an anonymous Chinese official: “The self-immolation
had a huge effect. Previously, most Chinese thought the crackdown was stupid, like a dog
catching a mouse. After those people burned themselves and the Party broadcast that little
girl’s face on TV for almost a month straight, people’s views here changed.”
486

Invariably Western observers noted how the self-immolation incident was “the latest
salvo in the government’s escalating campaign to discredit Falun Gong,”

“a crucial
moment in the public relations battle between the Chinese state and Falun Gong,” and a
“god-sent opportunity” which made China’s then President Jiang Zemin “very happy.”

487
Observing that “the media campaign against Falun Gong gained significant traction
following the act,
”
Matthew Forney stated that “the immolations …became a propaganda
bonanza for the government and marked a turning point in its anti-Falun Gong campaign.
Before that day, many Chinese had felt the crackdown had gone too far—that Falun
Gong posed no real threat. With the immolations, the government's...propaganda
campaign portraying Falun Gong as an ‘evil cult’ that unhinged its followers seemed
more credible.”
488

240
Now I want to read the devastating effect of the self-immolation incident against two
oddities and raise the question of “how and why this particular self-immolation is so
powerful in discrediting a movement.” The first oddity concerns the factuality of the
event. Western observers expressed their suspicions immediately after the
self-immolation took place. The exiled leadership of Falun Gong in New York
vehemently denied having anything to do with the occurrence, citing the fact that “the
teachings of Falun Gong prohibit any form of killing.”
489
Wall Street Journal’s senior
Beijing correspondent Ian Johnson found the “unusual alacrity” with which the event was
reported uncharacteristic of the state-controlled media. From his experiences, “most
reports for the evening news are vetted by noon, so the daily broadcast rarely carries
reports from the same day, let alone an event that happened at noon and involved satellite
feeds from relatively remote parts of the country." Therefore, Johnson deduced that
“either the death took place earlier than reported or the usually cautious media had
top-level approval to rush out electronic reports and a televised dispatch.”
490
Independent
journalist Danny Schechter’s attention focused on a medical impossibility in the footage:
“The government says doctors performed a tracheotomy on the (12-year-old) victim, but
a pediatric surgeon said that, if that were true, the child wouldn't be speaking right away.”
In addition, according to Schechter, “significantly, one of the CNN producers on the
scene, just 50 feet away, says she did not even see a child there.”
491
The little girl’s
mother who had reportedly died in the fire was found by Washington Post’s Philip Pan to
have never practiced Falun Gong.
492
The Speech Processing Laboratory at National
241
Taiwan University used facial and audio recognition techniques to scrutinize one
particular self-immolator and claimed that this individual appearing in the
self-immolation video was not the same person later standing on trial.
493
After
performing a frame-by-frame analysis of the state-media footages, New York-based New
Tang Dynasty TV asked who the embedded cameramen were working along with the
police, why the highly inflammable gasoline-filled sprite bottle never caught fire while
the man holding it was emitting smoke, and what was the true reason behind the
36-year-old mother’s violent death on film.
494
Summarizing all these loopholes, Hamish
McDonald stated the "ready availability of fire-extinguishers and official TV teams and
the lack of verification about the victims" raised questions about whether the Falun Gong
movement was ever involved.
495
Laogai Foundation Ann Noonan was more direct,
claiming that an event "staged or allowed to happen by China's government in order to
discredit the Falun Gong" was "hardly a far-fetched hypothesis" given the track record of
the Chinese Communist Party.
496

The second oddity concerns how Falun Gong’s alleged self-immolation was evaluated
by domestic public opinions. Admittedly, it was a time before the Tunisian young man of
the Arab Spring reminded the world that self-immolation under certain circumstances
could be a legitimate action of protest. However, many a historical precedent had existed
to endorse or even glorify the power of self-immolation. In East Asia, it is regarded as a
"respectable Buddhist tradition” going back to medieval China and Japan.
497
In modern
242
times, Vietnam’s Reverend Quang Duc’s self-burning “performed a visual embodiment
of violence done by an ‘other’.”
498
Having surveyed as many as 533 cases of
self-immolation spanning from 1963 to 2002, sociologist Michael Biggs maintains that
self-immolation is a unique and ultimate political protest whose powerful statement
should be taken seriously. Most of the self-immolation instances surveyed had the effect
of shifting the political balance of the time, galvanized “sympathizers to contribute more
to the cause” and “converted bystanders by signaling the depth…of grievances.”
499 500

Also according to Biggs, one of the only two anomalies of the 533 cases is Falun Gong’s
alleged self-immolation, which, rather than winning support from bystanders, suffered
from “disavowal” and denial from the “comrades” of the self-immolation participants.

Apparently these two oddities mentioned above hardly entered the domestic discussions
on self-immolation nor did they subtract from its overwhelmingly negative impact on the
Chinese audience. In light of this discrepancy, I seek to explore and account for the
negative spin put on the self-immolation incident by the Chinese state media.
501
I want to
ask how what could have been a tour de force inspired by religious heroism went astray
in its representations. How is it, as one religious leader puts it, that the “noblest form of
struggle which symbolizes the spirit of nonviolence of Buddhism” ended up being
condemned as an utmost case of “anti-family” and “anti-health crime committed by a
cult?”
502
To understand the source of derogatory assessments attached to it, I want to
suggest that the key lies in the construction (or the obliteration) of “agency” of the
243
participants which turned voluntary sacrifice into a “captivity narrative.” Typically
recounted by apostates on the harms of new religious movements, captivity narratives
de-substantiate “agent” into “duped automaton” acting at the biddings of a brainwasher;
any act of protest issued from the individual thus duped is hence stripped of agency and
dismissed as compulsive motion or conditioned reflex. I will first illuminate captivity
narratives from a dramatistic point of view, and then illustrate the exigency leading up to
the moment of self-immolation which called for stories able to “undo” the agency of the
protestors. Finally, I will render a detailed analysis of the official media coverage of the
self-immolation incident through the lens of captivity and apostate narratives.

A Dramatistic Perspective on Captivity Narratives and Apostate’s Accounts

Lying at the foundation of Burke’s dramatistic conception is the distinction between
motivated act and unmotivated motion. As Burke puts it, animals move, and humans
motivate, act and define action with symbols. He further argues that “The possibility of
an act is grounded in the ‘will’ of an agent…and (for) a will to be a will (it) must be
free,” “not conditioned responses to a stimulus.”
503
Following this formula, if an act does
not come from a free will but a hallucinatory mind or the outcome of external compulsion,
the act is reducible to motion.

244
Burke situates “act” in the center of his pendatic framework, but the interpretation of
“act” and the imputation of “motive” are inflected by a dominant term or ratio.
504
Burke
also argues that the terms of the pentad are ambiguous by nature, their boundaries
permeable, and the benefits of such ambiguity reaped by rhetoricians to advance their
agenda. Arguments highlighting “agent” (in agent-act, agent-agency, and agent-scene
ratio) present actor as rational and capable, controlling of the “scene” and selective of
means. If the agent is in control, the act thus taken is considered premeditated and moral,
holding the act-issuer accountable for the consequence thereof. Argument featuring a
scenic point of view, however, mitigates the autonomy of the agent while making a case
for the objectively constraining factors. “The situation itself exerts principal control over
the people encompassed within it,”
505
writes Birdsell referring to the construction in the
Reagan speech of the malignant scene in Beirut considered responsible for foiling the
American military endeavors in that area. In certain cases, an agent being overwhelmed
by scenic pressure is absolved of guilt and culpability, as exemplified in Edward
Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick apologia where environmental factors rendered everyone
involved victims of hostile natural elements.
506

Depending on the rhetorical need, the distinction between scene and agent can be
blurred in describing opposing forces vis-à-vis “us.” The opponent can be “scene-fied”
into an alien presence comprised of random danger and unreason beyond human control,
or anthromorphized as being endowed with “calculated mischief” and always lying in
245
wait to prey on the good and innocent. As illustrated in Birdsell’s analysis of the Reagan
speeches, such ambiguity comes to the fore in describing “the enemies” relative to “us:”
In order to salvage the integrity of our combat troops, Reagan accentuated the scenic
pressure in Beirut and implied that there was little shame in loosing to an unintelligible
and non-human force (as opposed to a human army of loopholes and weaknesses just like
us); but in order to celebrate our military success in Cuba, Reagan described the enemy in
human terms, making it sound like a beguiling and vicious creature (counter-agent) but
matchless to “our” (the agent) wisdom and strength.
507
It seems to be routine that in a
situation where “we” can outwit the antagonists

“we” are apt to be cast as a capable agent
who can easily overpower the enemy. Under such a circumstance chaos is but a short and
transitional shake-up before the final resolution to restore order and redeem things tainted
by evil. Yet in situations where “we” are weaker, the overpowering effect of external
factors not under “our” control is cited as a “scene” to extenuate our responsibilities.

The exposition above on agent and scene helps set up captivity narratives themed on
abduction, rescue and absolution.

Captivity narratives first emerged in the course of Westerners’ encounter with
non-Western civilizations, usually involving people of European descent captured by
mysterious and barbaric others. One sub-genre of it, American Indian captivity literature,
was popular among earlier settlers in North America and incorporated into the founding
246
myth of the nation. Scholars such as Linda Colley and Pauline Strong have noted
captivity narratives’ role in cultivating a decided “other.”
508
Abound in captivity
narratives are dramatic tensions between light and darkness, heathens and Christians,
alien temptation and God’s redemption -- they make for religious tracts and cautionary
tales in their own right. In a sense, it is not a far-stretched hypothesis to say that the
master Christian narrative -- grounded in temporary loss and exile and eventual return
and reclamation -- typifies captivity themes.

The heathens worship the devil and are diabolical themselves. The modern day
“heathens,” that is, “cults,” are plagued with apostate accounts adopting a captivity angle.
In them, “brainwashing” and “coercively orchestrated affiliation” are listed as the most
heinous crimes. Having the temerity to flee and stand up to their previous religious
organizations, “apostates” coming forth are often viewed as “rescued and recovering”
members fortunate enough to be liberated from cults’ deadly clutches. “Explaining both
the former affiliation and the eventual departure” in terms of captivity, apostates stand as
potentially invaluable sources of testimony for anti-cult movement.
509
Some of the
public and vocal claims-making by apostates are packaged into great exodus stories
which have garnered media attention and reinforced the “hostage” assumption projected
onto followers of new religious movements.
510
Oftentimes, apostate memoirs help
neutralize support for alternative religions, justify social control measures targeting
certain groups, and catapult apostates into successful careers of moral
247
entrepreneurship.
511

A pendatic analysis can further help illuminate the incriminatory account apostates
have leveled against their former ideology. I argue that the root term for captivity
narratives is “agent” who in this case is obliterated and reduced into a “captive” or “serf”
“moving” instead of “acting” at the command of the “captors’” who are presumably
equipped with irresistible brainwashing agency. As Stuart Wright observes, the apostate’s
“account is formulated to emphasize the alleged manipulation, entrapment, and capture of
the idealistic and unsuspecting target” in the clutches of cult and its leader.
512
With the
demolishing of free will, one is conditioned to move in response to external stimulus; the
stolen autonomy of the agent defeats the validity of any moral, religious, or political
claims she might seek to advance with her act.

Accountability of wrongdoings is calculated on the basis of the agency involved. While
the cult leader and his lieutenants are faulted as “evil masterminds” and shoulder the
brunt of the blame, captivated members are deemed far less culpable. The rank and file
members, being gullible and mislead, are usually thought of as “crippled, wronged and
abused,” being “excusable victims” rather than full-fledged evil-doers. Indeed,
“victimization” of the “cult members” suggests that their anomaly should be explained
through medical and health lenses, for they are “sick” instead of willing accomplices of
the devil.
513
The “sick” label carries with it great implications for the treatment of
248
deviance. The modern theory of “medicalization of deviance” argues that the “sick” (as
opposed to the “evil, sinful, abominable or criminal”) belong to an entirely different
category; once the “sick” status is established, their matter should shift from the religious
and judicial terrain to that of medical.

As Gusfield puts it, “the sick person is not
responsible for his acts. He is excused from the consequences which attend the healthy
who act the same way.”
514
Thus defined, “the sick” need be tended compassionately for
healing and rehab purposes rather than sentenced and punished by law enforcement. The
controlling measures hence meted out should be conducted by medical personnel to help
reintegrate the lost and deviant back into society.

With the ordinary cult members diminished into “victims” and “patients”, the real war
is waged between the two able-bodied warriors, i.e. the cult and the counter-cult
movement on a mission to “rescue the hostages” and “break the allure of cult.” With the
battle line re-drawn, the counter-cult movement (oftentimes led by the state) now places
the victims of the cult under its protection --- in fact, one finds in the image of the “duped,
exploited and endangered” the everlasting symbol of children, home and community, the
once beloved but now defiled and in need of rescue and redemption. Mari Boor Tonn et
al describe how we tend to objectify “families, homes, and communities” into passive
scene-like objects in need of defense, and in the meantime we also sanctify them into
holy entities demanding absolute devotion.
515
Excessive measures are justified in the
name of protecting children, community, and land, whereas blames are always placed on
249
the “alien intruder” and “trespasser” foraging into “our homes” for loots and exploits.
This chapter will explore the four topoi, i.e. family, health, politics and religion from a
slightly different angle. Instead of treating the topoi as organizing principles marshaling
arguments around, I will let them lay low, as they are already embedded in apostates’
self-absolving and incriminating stories on captivity. Indeed, captivity narratives are in
and of themselves statements about health, family, religion and politics: Since capturing
entails a snatch away from family, rationality and the normalcy of life, crusades against
“cult” are usually mounted in the name of family, children and health.
516
The political
dimension is most prominently evident in the role of the state leading the anti-cult
coalition, and in the intense politicization captivity narratives are subject to, being
“pivotal to authorize an expansion in the scope and severity of social control measures”
by public agencies.
517
A kind of religious zeal is displayed by the “born-again”
ex-members seeking to maximize the moral gap between the “cult” and society,
inundating their stories with images of rebirth, repentance and redemption. Just as Wright
asserts, “the intensity…in which the apostate embraces the new moral vision, seeks
atonement through public confession and testimony, and makes salvific claims of
redemption, at least suggests that the ex-member’s new affiliation may be analyzed as a
type of quasi-religious conversion in is own right.”
518
In short, in constructing a story in
which a deviant religion steals autonomy and reduces agents to helpless children, all of
the four topoi have come to lend a hand.

250
The Historical Contingency at the Moment of Self-Immolation

Eighteen months (from July 1999 to Jan 2011) into the crackdown, the propaganda
diatribes, harsh as they were, had turned out to be less than effective. The government
had been casting Falun Gong as a challenger to the political regime and a disrupter of the
hegemonic ideology by focusing on the movement’s downtown Beijing mass petition and
its non-Marxist faith. “The crackdown was justified with the myth of a day of infamy -
April 25,”
519
and then “the government banned the movement in July 1999, calling it the
biggest threat to one communist party rule since the Tiananmen democracy protests.”
520

The political charges didn’t go very far if not to a total persuasive dead-end. “The
gray-haired retirees in tennis shoes are enemies of the state?” Observers to this fray often
asked in disbelief, not to mention a significant number of the April 25 petitioners were
government carders and ranking officers themselves– those within the status quo. During
the seven years preceding the mass petition, from 1992 to 1999, the ordinary Chinese had
some impression of the popularity of Falun Gong and the good press it used to receive.
Now confronted with a drastic shift in Falun Gong’s public image, veterans of Chinese
politics understood that another round of political campaign was on. Many commented
how anachronistic the propaganda was, out of sync with the glossy image of the Modern
New China.
521
Embarrassed and ashamed, some felt the ghost of Cultural Revolution
was haunting again, but should come and pass soon like before, while others started to
recall the not so distant memory of the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989.
251
As the anti-Falun Gong media campaign roared on, albeit confronted with a scenario in
which, in the words of Falun Gong’s founder Li Hongzhi, “heaven has crashed down on
us,” Falun Gong did not fold as the government had hoped. Gradually, a whiff of
suppressed jubilation started to creep in, as onlookers described how they were
galvanized for the first time since the Tiananmen movement. Ian Johnson in his Pulitzer
Prize winning Wild Grass profiled Ms. Zhang, an ordinary woman from the heart of
China – Weifang, Shandong. Not a Falun Gong practitioner herself and previously
opposed to her Falun Gong mother’s quiet and stubborn insistence which brought about
harassments, penalties and detentions, Ms. Zhang eventually grew proud of practitioners
like her mother who “believed in themselves enough to stand up for their rights.”
522

In sympathetic terms, Falun Gong practitioners were described by the Western
observers as “David against Goliath.”
523
The Chinese audiences, whose voices were
scarcely audible in written expressions, made their attitudes known in the relatively poor
reception of the anti-Falun media campaign. According to James Tong’s data,
subscription to anti-Falun Gong publications was declining and the CCTV-produced
propaganda programs suffered poor ratings.
524
“People expressed weariness,” said
Washington Post’s Beijing correspondent Philip Pan.
525
Indeed, all signs indicated that
the domestic audience simply got jaded over the incessant propaganda barrage and tuned
away. The overall sentiment prior to the self-immolation incident was characterized by
independent journalist Danny Schechter as one of “fatigue” over media hyperbole, mixed
252
with suppressed “sympathy” toward Falun Gong.
526

That Falun Gong was incidentally glorified as a wronged victim of political power
abuse or even worse, decked out as a righteous hero, was the last thing Beijing wanted.
Beijing was in its final stage of Olympic bid. Its less than glorious human rights record
had already “helped sink the city's bid for the 2000 Games.”
527
This time around, in
preparation for the arrival of the evaluating Olympic Committee delegation, Beijing was
determined to not let any human rights foibles obstruct its path. To turn the tide of
domestic as well as international opinion against Falun Gong, Beijing needed to come up
with a better story, and it did. In revamping its campaign strategy, Beijing argued that
“Falun Gong should not be used as an excuse to deny the country again.”
528
That is to
say, Falun Gong was not to be considered a valid human rights platform and the
self-immolation incident was meant to prove just that. Eagerly, Beijing wanted to
reconfigure the Falun Gong issue as not pertinent to political suppression and resistance,
but concerning endangered ordinary lives that the state set out to rescue. In essence,
Beijing was proclaiming, “With Falun Gong we don’t have dissidents but a bunch of
weirdoes and sociopaths.”

Scholars and journalists have pointed out that labeling Falun Gong “cult” was “smart of
Beijing.”
529
As a banner, the cult label appealed to a pre-existing constellation of media
and scholarly concerns in the West implicated in circa millennial fear. Indeed, the
253
discovery of another “cult” in Falun Gong helped give the steam-losing “Western
anti-cult movement a new cause.”
530
The “cult” label, however, dropped on the table
three months before the self-immolation incident, had not materialized in anything
concrete following the manner of Aum Shinrikyo or People’s Temple. Although from an
early stage rumors were circulated about possible radicalization of the movement, the
rank and file only adopted peaceful means of protest and the Falun Gong leadership also
urged the followers to stay calm and rational. All the circumstantial factors - the
ineffectiveness of politicizing Falun Gong, Falun Gong’s persistent peaceful activism, the
public blasé over the media campaign, and the incoming delegation from the Olympic
Committee -- called for a strategic revamp in which high politics and conspiratorial
allegations be dropped and replaced by something more relevant and convincing to the
audience.

The tone change, as a matter of fact, was presaged in Party Chief Jiang Zemin’s
pitch-setting directive. “Collect cases where they avoid medications and encourage
self-mutilations,” Jiang instructed in his memo in April, 1999.
531
While the official
editorials from the People’s Daily still stressed the sanctity of political order -- “when
handling the Falun Gong issue …stability is the highest interest of the country and the
people,” tropes about health and family started to crawl in. “We must fully understand the
serious consequences ‘Falun Gong’ will have on the physical and mental health of its
practitioners,” one editorial intoned.
532
The advantage of adopting an “anti-health,
254
anti-life” framework is that it helps cast in doubt the credibility and autonomy of the
activists and protestors who are made to look like little more than mindless “puppets and
pawns.” If only the state media could land on one ideal scenario of antisocial violence
where “the cult leader issued a call for everyone to take cyanide” and the members
complied, what had been perceived as activism could be discredited as befuddled choices.

Assembling a Dramatic Cast

The bulk of the self-immolation drama is contained in one episode of Focus, a 30-min
long TV magazine resembling 60 minutes in production technique and sophistication.
The narrative of the Focus episode is in chronological order. It starts with a still,
panoramic shot of the Tiananmen Square, much like what is available from a surveillance
camera. On the far horizon, black smokes are billowing, as a group of policemen, some in
plain clothes, run past police car barricades in the smoke’s direction. The camera then
trails the running cops and pans toward the smoke. The next shot is from a medium
distance, capturing the full length of Mr. Wang Jindong, the only male involved and later
identified as the mastermind of the incident. Wang, a medium-built man in his late 40’s,
is sitting in what critics say a poor semblance of Falun Gong’s folded leg position.
533

Despite being discernibly covered in soot and ashes, the thick clothes he wears bulging,
he himself stays in a fairly good shape. What is amazing - and what some critics have
found suspicious - is that the inflammable Sprite bottle said to be half-full of gasoline
255
(from which he drank) is nestled between his crossed legs, green and intact, having
survived the fire. Wang has so far been motionless and action-less. The camera focuses
on him for a few seconds, as if waiting; in the meantime, one policeman is dangling a fire
blanket over Wang’s head, also waiting. Then, finally, Wang moves into action. He starts
to shout: “Falun Dafa is the cosmic law that everyone must go through!” With this
slogan-like sentence which clearly indicates the cause he is protesting for, as if on cue,
the fire blanket stops its mid-air dangling and comes swooping down on Wang’s fireless
body. When this action sequence is complete, the camera moves away. The next shot is
from a wide angle of a distant imbroglio. In the center is the dark silhouette of a standing
woman writhing in agony. Smoke shooting up from her, she is frantically whirling about,
apparently in excruciating pain. Circling her is a group of policemen in army overcoats,
one discharging a jet of foam at her from a fire extinguisher. Two seconds later, this
woman, later known as 36-year-old Liu Chunlin, is seen to collapse to her death, ending
the hurried sequence of actions revolving around her. Coming up next is a close-up of her
12-year-old daughter, Liu Siying, whose tiny body darkened and charred, shivering in
Beijing’s freezing winter air, wailing for her mother. At this point, the narrative has
exhausted feeds purportedly from the Square’s surveillance camera, and moved the scene
to CCTV’s studio and the hospital the victims were later housed in. It first brings in
defector Liu Baorong, a retired blue-collar worker in her mid-50s, who confesses to the
camera that the self-immolators’ motive was to “go to the heaven” through burning. Then,
to illustrate the aftermath of self-burning, the scene shifts to inside the hospital, where the
256
fiasco at Tiananmen is finally reigned in by the orderly milieu of a medical facility. A
doctor in white coat calmly relates that the 12-year-old Liu Siying has “40% burns” and
has just “undergone tracheotomy” for her “severe respiratory injury.” His words are
supplemented by the probing shots lingering on the thickly bandaged body of the young
girl, who is surprisingly still able to give an interview, in a voice loud and clear, to a
CCTV reporter. Also magnified is a 19-year-old music student lying disfigured in
hospital bed, expressing regrets for her action to a group of “teachers, authorities, and
family members” convening at her ward. Her mentor is lamenting that she can no longer
play the Pipa. Then the program features in-depth interviews of analysts and families
who condemn the “self-destructiveness of the cult.” All the while, news anchors and field
reporters control the narration, wheeling in and out of acts, roles, scenes and
sentiments.
534

Independent journalist Danny Schechter marveled at how “dramatic” and “convenient”
the coverage was: “People are setting themselves on fire in Tiananmen Square in the
heart of Beijing…The police just happen to have fire extinguishers on hand, and the
victims are rushed to a hospital after their agonies are thoroughly photographed for state
television.”
535
With all due respect to the suffering of the victims, the story set-up, from
characterization to plot, does look scripted. The program encompasses a rich tableau of
dramatic personae in well- choreographed movements: A male mastermind spewed a
totalistic-sounding one-liner framing the occurrence with a mind-boggling rationale, a
257
expendable foot-soldier, also a mother, died a violent death live on film to provide
undeniable factual evidence, her 12-year-old daughter, later dubbed “China’s Elian
Gonzales,” indicted the “evil cult” with the innocence of a child, a pair of musicians
(another mother-daughter pair) whose talent and career perished with their mangled
hands, and finally, a defector, who later became the linchpin of the story, conveniently
fleshing out all the missing details regarding perpetrators’ intentions and motives. Thanks
to her, the incident was instantly perceived as pointless self-destruction as newspapers
splashed headlines such as “nirvana means murder” across their front pages. This cast,
packing action with narration, each rounded out the “deleterious and ruinous effect of the
cult” in their respective way; their behaviors managed to elicit a range of sentiments
including disbelief, sympathy, pity, disgust and hatred. A staged media event or not, it
amounts to a well-written, finely executed play.

The story did not just end with the airing of the self-immolation program. For the moral
campaign to be complete, it was necessary for the self-immolators to turn, sooner or later,
into apostates and turn their ire onto their former affiliation. Without them defecting to
the good side, to be rescued and reclaimed, there would be no captivity narratives.

258
Forging Captivity Narratives: Slashing Self-Immolators’ Motives as “Crazy”

Central to delegitimating individuals as agents is to de-substantiate their motives and
the ideologies informing the actions. If they have questionable motives, shaky judgment
or irrational beliefs, the validity of their agent-hood can be cast in doubt. Wright states
that in captivity narratives it is necessary for apostates to “dismiss or discredit” their
former experience as “false conversion.”
536
In imputing the motives of the
self-immolators, discrediting was at work in the official media to remove the substance of
the individuals’ pursuits. To achieve that, it was necessary to expose the doctrinal fallacy
which had a firm hold on the believers.

According to World Journal’s Justin Yu, "The PRC's propaganda coup against the
Falun Gong relies upon people’s (mis)understanding of” the political, religious and
cultural context of “previous self-immolation events in recent Asian history.”
537
It is
against such a history that most previous self-immolation instances are construed as a
“unique but ultimate form of protest,”

“positively correlated with the Hindu and Buddhist
presence” in Asian countries.
538
Also against this historical context, self-immolation is,
in the words of Michelle Young, “a religiously inspired act and a political reclamation of
agency” for the suppressed.
539
Positive historical connections and references, however,
were expunged from the official media portrayal of Falun Gong’s self-immolation. The
lineage spanning from Vietnam’s Reverend Quang Duc to Czech’s Jan Palach – instances
259
endowing self-immolation with an air of tragic heroism, was replaced by references to
Aum Shinrikyo and Jonestown Massacre. The political context of the incident – a
state-led oppression of a semi-religious group – was also hollowed out. Instead, Falun
Gong’s self-immolation was treated as nothing more than an act of absurdity in which
religious fanatics were deluded by a nonsensical prospect and burnt themselves to
achieve that goal. The official Xinhua News Agency reports that “avid Falun Gong
practitioners” fantasized about “how wonderful it would be to enter heaven” in the
preceding week as they contemplated self-burning.
540
Xinhua quotes apostate Liu
Baorong who confessed that "Everyone of us knew what we were doing …We were
prepared to set ourselves on fire and go up to heaven.”
541
Most damningly, according to
Xinhua, such an understanding was attributed to her reading of Li Hongzhi’s recent
publications. Rejecting suggestions that self-immolation might be an insolated,
self-determined initiative, Xinhua proclaims the group’s founder should be responsible:
“They (self-immolators) were driven to burn themselves by what Li Hongzhi said in the
‘scripture,’ such as ‘forget death and life’ and ‘seek nirvana.’”
542
Why Tiannamen
Square in particular, then? Not because Tiananmen was a symbolic hub drawing
protesters of all stripes, which would have been a rational choice by sensible agents.
Opting for Tiananmen as the burning site, again, stemmed from delusion and zealotry. In
the words of apostate Liu Baorong: “There had been a rumor that an old female
practitioner in Northeast China saw in her dream the words ‘registration for Falun Dafa
followers’ written on the Tiananmen Rostrum.”
543
Her logic was echoed by Wang
260
Jingdong, the alleged organizer, when he also recalled purchasing hearsay as true
inspiration. In his memoir evocative of the last moment of Heaven’s Gate and the
People’s Temple, Wang described how an “end-of-day” scenario befell on him, and he
felt “the cosmic arrangement” was such that the “impending apocalypse” was “pressing
near” and the “chosen few would experience transfiguration” and “ascend into the heaven
with the body transforming into rainbow.”
544
Wang’s hunch was confirmed when he met
a “highly respectable and spiritual” person who often compared “Falun Gong cultivators
to lotus flowers in blazing fire” -- a figure of speech Wang took literally. According to
this person who inspired Wang, “the severity of the moment posed an austere test for all”
and the answer to that was revealed in a meditative trance wherein this person “had
already enacted and experienced self-immolation at Tiananmen.”
545
Upon hearing this,
Wang was determined to follow suit by burning himself at Tiananmen. He lobbied
around for sympathizers and eventually mustered a fellowship of willing sacrificers.
Regardless of the truthfulness of Wang’s remarks, the Chinese state who initiated the
brutal crackdown in the first place was left out of his own narrative, excused of its
culpability.
546
In the official representation of Falun Gong’s self-immolation, references
to the draconian policy were eclipsed by religious mumbo-jumbo and self-immolators’
crazy, pitiful appearances. The official rhetoric concluded that these individuals
radicalized all on their own or due to their deranged beliefs.

261
Had all self-immolators perished in the fire without returning to tell the story and pick
their old beliefs apart, they would probably have been treated as futile yet tragic
protestors in the eyes of the secular world. Devastatingly, what could have been a
desperate protest ended up being made into a farce when defector Liu undermined what
little solemnity remained of those “sacrificing oneself, often by burning, with such
intension as to make an offering to the Buddha, to imitate the bodhisattvas and, notably to
protest oppression of the Dharma.”
547
Slouched in a chair at CCTV, the “foul-faced”
woman recounted why she decided to quit burning at the last moment. Although
self-described to be equally bent on “obtaining nirvana through self-burning” and
downing “half a Sprite bottle of gasoline,” she “woke up all of a sudden” to
not-so-glorious a picture of gruesomeness: “How come? Black smoke shooting up from
them (fellow self-immolators)? It ain’t pretty! Something must be wrong.” She said she
reasoned then that “according to (Falun) Dafa, at the moment of transfiguration, the
(burning) body should emit white smoke. It should be like, in a second, nirvana is
complete, with one gone on up in a flash of light, and the remaining body parts turned
into Śarīra. I was astounded to see black smokes rising up! It didn’t look good!”
548
Since
the airing of Liu’s remarks on CCTV, rants and fury from the viewing audience poured in:
“They really are crazy! The government is right!”
549
A former Falun Gong practitioner
told Time that he decided to stop practicing because now to him it was becoming foolish
nonsense: “It is not worth getting burned for such a belief.”
550
The most outrageous
account of motives was offered by the 12-year-old. All banged up and thickly bandaged
262
at ICU, little Liu Siying told the CCTV reporter that her mother inspired her with a vision
of heaven, and it was her mother who put her through the self-immolation ordeal:
“Heaven is a beautiful world where the sky is gold, birds are gold, and the streets are
paved gold, too.”
551
With her words, the nation burst into another round of outcry. Hate
crimes were reportedly committed by the ordinary folks against Falun Gong members.
Falun Gong was then blamed not only for pandering outlandish stories and supernatural
beliefs but raising suicidal lunatics and murderers of children.

The success of political protest depends on the correct interpretations on the part of the
viewing public. According to Karin Andriolo, protests by suicide risk being seen as
isolated and self-referential acts. She suggests that an “exchange” should be established
between the protestors and the intended audience who are to perceive the act as evident
of a larger injustice and a call to action.
552
In Biggs’ words, the successful completion of
the task of self-immolation ‘‘relies on the public’s understanding of their obligation to
respond.”
553
Falun Gong’s self-immolation was framed by the official media as a
conduct by ludicrous and deranged individuals in pursuit for non-existent and absurd
awards through extreme means. Although suicide in a public place is traditionally
associated with civil activism, the underlying motives as revealed in the official
representations indicated that this particular suicide by fire did not concern the audience
at all. To extend Andriolo’s logic, the exchange taking place was not one between the
movement members and sympathetic bystanders concerned with human rights, but one
263
between deranged cult members and the extreme doctrines they worship, between the cult
members and their leader. Under this circumstance, the audience was little more than
unwitting spectators accidentally drawn into an absurd and grotesque show of
buffoonery.

Forging Captivity Narratives: Delegitimating Self-Immolators as “Selfish”

Suicide as a social act has always been debatable. Durkheim locates suicide’s
redeeming values in when the noble few die for “altruistic” rather than selfish reasons.

Historical precedents have demonstrated that public suicide is justifiable and even
laudable if an authentic and credible individual (monk, student, scholar, activist, etc),
coerced by external and tangible pressure and abiding by the precept of “no-kill,” mounts
a carefully thought-out protest of self-killing against oppression on behalf of a
community. Individuals to die a defiant death such as this are revered as martyrs, saints
or guardians of a community. As Jan Hua states in tracing this “respected” Buddhist
tradition, “it is clear that… these self-immolated monks, whatever might be the manner
of their unnatural death, are worthy beings provided that they died from noble motives…
Inspired by selfless goals of mercy and compassion toward others, such determined and
compassionate action is rare in this selfish and stingy world.”
554
On the other hand,
actions not aimed at advancing a collective cause are subject to criticism that suiciders
are but selfish and craven escapists.
264
Since the early period of the anti-Falun Gong campaign, a repeated line of
accusation against the “die-hard” Falun Gong followeres are that they are “selfish” and
oblivious to the sufferings they have brought on to their loved ones by going against the
government orders. Mathew Forney of Time reported that the police jailed a 31-year-old
art teacher for “unfurling a yellow banner” in defense of Falun Gong and “threatened to
dispatch her to one of China’s labor camps.” The whole family was mobilized to
deprogram her. “Her terrified parents begged her to disavow her beliefs. Her husband
smacked her. At work, her boss threatened to fire her. Then someone brought her
weeping daughter to jail, and her will broke.” Accepting the police’s blaming of her
being self-absorbed and singing a pledge to "split from the evil cult Falun Gong and its
heresies," the art teacher told the Time reporter that "I realized I was thinking only of
myself.”
555

The same argument was reiterated from the repentant self-immolators after the
state-sponsored anti-cult coalition broke them. For example, mastermind Wang’s wife, an
avid practitioner herself, spoke on behalf her family and claimed that self-immolators
were only pursuing self-serving goals. “Just calm down and think about it: we were too
preoccupied with our own interests. In order to achieve ‘nirvana’ and “heavenly awards,”
we did things against the interests and pleadings of our families.” Picking the Falun Gong
doctrines apart, she reasoned: “Isn’t the goal of cultivation to put others ahead of oneself
under all circumstances? What good would cultivation and nirvana do if we only serve
265
ourselves?”
556
Her words struck a sympathetic chord with countless Falun Gong
practitioners under the pressure from the government and their own families. Acting in a
way to remove “selfishness” from their moral compasses – behaviors they think were true
to the Falun Gong teachings, large numbers of Falun Gong followers signed documents
of repentance.

In the 12-year-old girl we can find a vulgarized version of ultimate bliss also predicated
on selfish motives. According to the official Xinhua News Agency, little Liu Siying’s
mother had been feeding her a vision since a very young age: “Her mother created
‘paradise’ for her, telling her she would become a ‘religious queen’ once she entered
‘paradise’ and that she'd have many servants if she became king.”
557
Reading this, some,
alluding to the caricaturized version of Jihadism, asked in jest: “Which paradise is better
– the one with ‘72 virgins in heaven’ or the one furnishing ‘many servants’ to a girl?”
558

By association, Falun Gong was put on par with militant Islamic organizations that were
depicted as insane and despicable in luring people with unattainable sensual pleasures
and material awards in the afterlife.

The selfish motives disclosed were only matched by the self-immolators’ indecent
appearances which were greatly aggrandized in grotesque media representations. In
David Halberstam’s memoir of the prototype-setting self-immolation undertaken by
Vietnam’s Reverend Thích Quảng Đức, the orderly procession of his entourage, mass
266
praying, his white robe and his stoic calmness in “sitting bravely and peacefully,
enveloped in flames”
559
endowed his action with ritualistic purity and religious sanctity.
As Halberstam wrote: “I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask
questions, too bewildered to even think... As he burned he never moved a muscle, never
uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around
him.”
560
It is obvious that Reverend Duc’s saintly appearance was considered a reflection
of his impeccable character and his lofty goal. Quantitatively, students, on account of
their idealistic passion, were the most frequent self-immolators next to religious figures,
their youth imbuing their actions with an inherent innocence and tragicness. When a
young Vietnamese student was going to sacrifice herself in fire, she prepared herself
carefully. Her fellow students described her as “wearing a beautiful violet ao dai with
gold embroidery, her hair delicately arranged” like a beautiful bride.
561
Authentic
figures’ actions are matched by outwardly befitting appearances and styles. Such
ritualistic purity and solemnity was lacking in the official representation of Falun Gong’s
self-immolation. By contrast, ghastly images and distorted figures were voyeuristically
magnified and hurtled in our face. The official media portrayed self-immolators as
“scurrying fireballs in horrible screams,”
562
as the camera dwelled ruthlessly, and for a
prolonged period of time, on the child’s newly torched torso convulsing in cold air.
Defector Liu, of little education and obese, was a repulsive and slimy figure, while
mastermind Wang Jindong was shown to be a puny guy with shifty eyes. Obscene and
grotesque close-ups were extensively used to drive home the horrendous effect of
267
self-immolation: the 12-year-old was seen bandaged like a mummy at ICU, while the 19-
year-old music student languishing in a drab patient garment, swollen like a balloon,
giving a zombie-like, eye-brow-less smile to the camera.
563
In order to instill fear and
disgust, the official propaganda machine went all out stripping the last shred of human
dignity from these people.

Forging Captivity Narratives: De-legitimating Self-Immolators as Weak-minded,
Idealistic and Prone to Manipulation

After eliminating the validity of the religious doctrines informing self-immolators’
motives and actions, the official media trumpeted their biographic profiles and
psychological composition as prone to abuse and deception: They were not only victims
of their own life history, but ready targets for predatory cult as well. Just as Wright states,
captivity narratives identify “personality factors or defects as contributing to heightened
vulnerability of some individuals.”
564

Defector Liu who incoherently jabbered on TV about black-smoke falling short of her
expectation was a departure from the mainstay of Falun Gong practitioners – educated,
urban, and solidly middleclass. But the official media profiled her as a typical Falun
Gong follower who is “credulous” and “lowly educated,” an ideal target exploitative
groups would seek out: “There are a mass of uneducated and gullible country-pumpkins
268
like her poised to be duped by the cult.”
565

Of the five immolators, two were mother/daughter pairs, and both single parents at the
margin of society. The 36-year-old burning to death at the Tiananmen Square was
described as “leading a troubled life” by her neighbors. “They quarreled often before she
drove (her adoptive mother) from their home last year,” said a neighbor to Washington
Post. “There was something wrong with her. She hit her mother…and her daughter, too.”
Emerging from the neighbor’s narrative was the picture of a desperate young mother with
a fatherless child and earning money by dining and dance with men at a local night
club.
566

By contrast, the musicians, both college-educated, fit the image of “idealistic and
unsuspecting members” manipulated by cult due to their own “undiscerning spiritual
thirst.”
567

The musician mother, Hao Huijun, was described as having “suffered from a miserable
marriage.” Hao, being a “high-spirited, college-educated and sensitive artist,” was
unfortunately married to a “crass factory worker” who was “alcoholic and abusive,” thus
recounted Hao’s sister.
568
Explaining away Hao’s attachment to Falun Gong as little
more than the effect of a mental pacifier, Hao’s sister said they “thought Falun Gong
might do her some good” in the midst of family chaos. After the husband passed away,
269
she was said to “have stepped up her involvement in the group.” The daughter, who
“inherited her mother’s artistic talent and emotional sensitivity,” was known for her
disgust over her father and over-reliance on her mother: “Endeavoring to meet all her
mother’s expectations and complying with her request unconditionally,” “that’s how the
19-year-old Chen Guo got in (the Falun Gong group).”
569

Hao’s sister also portrayed her as the “best person ever lived even among the best.” As
such, she was “obstinate, idealistic,” having an unfulfilled spiritual yearning arising from
a true artistic soul. “She would not listen once she was set on an idea.”
570
Her daughter’s
rich and lively imaginations, expressed in her music sensitivity according to her mentor,
also contributed to her being attracted to things spiritual. “What has made her music take
wing also ruined her,” lamented the teacher.
571
As Wright describes, it conforms to
standard captivity narratives to play up members’ “gullibility, obstinate, low tolerance for
ambiguity, native idealism, etc.” which in part accounts for the “hostages’ abduction by
cult.”
572
The 19-year-old was further portrayed by the official media as having led a
much shielded life, and hence out of touch with reality. “Her life had no other content but
what was happening at the studio, classrooms, and college dorm.”
573
This sheltered and
monotonous lifestyle rendered her “pitiably lacking common sense for a college student.”
So when an adult told her “unlike average people, Falun Gong practitioners would not
feel pain when they were on fire; they would rise to heaven in a second,” she believed.
574

270
Forging Captivity Narratives: De-Legitimating Self-Immolators as Totalizing and
Self-Isolating

Captivity narratives stress personal defects and circumstantial disadvantages which
make members defenseless against entrapment and capturing; it also claims that once
“brainwashed,” devotees in the grip of “cults” would value their religious identity above
all the other roles they assume in society. Variously called “totalization” or “exclusivity”
motif, the primacy of religious identity to the individual to the extent of rendering
unimportant all the other social roles is another central objection raised against “cults”
and something that solidifies their “despotic” or “authoritarian” image.
575
“Indeed, the
defining features of a ‘totalistic’ religious organization are that it encourages exclusivity,
separatism, single-mindedness, total commitment, and deep religious faith.”
576
Critics of
NRMs also employ a “health” argument which views one identity blocking all the others
a harmful proclivity for the individual.

“Total immersion” is conditioned upon deliberate isolation from families and friends
and from any objections raised against “the cult.” The self-immolators were described by
the official media as inducing themselves into total immersion and total commitment
against their best interests and the pleadings of family. What’s more, the interaction
between “the obsessed” and the “rational voices” around them resembled a tug of war.

271
Three of the self-immolators were parents. Under the “influence of the cult,” they were
described as having a warped agency, albeit equally forceful, and detrimental to the
interests of their loved ones. Invariably, the parents were described as having mediated
“the influence of the cult” to their children. The 36-year-old who was burned to death
was accused by her adoptive mother as “being obsessed:” “‘I had never thought that
Siying’s life would be ruined by her mother,’ said the elderly lady of her adopted
daughter and grand daughter.”
577
The 48-year-old musician mother was reportedly more
sophisticated and eloquent, fighting for the soul of her 19-year-old daughter with
professors at her daughter’s music academy. Such fights were highlighted in a long
article titled “Between Mentor and Mother.”
578
When the music mentor reprimanded the
girl for having drifted away from her music career and into Falun Gong, the 19-year-old,
being an impressionable youth, felt torn into different directions, and “cried in
confusion.” Where the child was unassertive and hesitant, her mother was not. In a letter
to her daughter, Hao wrote: “you are the most precious of my life---how could I
jeopardize your welfare?”
579
To the teacher, the 48-year-old mother wrote that “she was
my child as much as yours. I would not hurt her the same as you wouldn’t.”
580

Mr. Wang, the only male on the team and the able-bodied mastermind of the fiery event,
was considered to be in possession of more agency and autonomy once he was
“converted by the cult”. His self-isolation from normalcy went hand in hand with
converting his entire family. “Ever since he took up Falun Gong, he proceeded to convert
272
his wife and daughter.”
581
Originally a successful businessman owning a thriving
souvenir shop, irrationality was reportedly invading Wang’s life as he and his wife, out of
qualms over “making money,” started to let their business die by “sitting outside the store
and told customers that the owners were not in.” Wang’s daughter was said to be a young
adult into fashion magazines and beauty products. Her hobby was not well-received by
her parent. “Quit reading those magazines! Read the Falun Gong book instead!” Wang
scowled. Under the “restraining orders” from Wang, his wife “gave up her fondness for
spicy food, TV-watching and the daughter gave away cosmetic products, and dared not to
sing popular songs. The family members took to suppressing themselves, their spirits
withered, drifting away into the cult.” Wang even went to the extent of dissuading his
daughter – whose “grades were exceptional and who was about to be sent to study in
Japan” -- into “letting go of this great opportunity”. When his daughter’s fiancé expressed
dissenting views, he “wacked the sensible young chap on his head” and “called him a
pig-head.”
582
The end result was that the daughter had to distance herself from her
boyfriend and the whole family was “hijacked into the deviant circle of the cult.”
583
The
loss of collective agent-hood resulted in the entire family being “captured by
abnormality.”
584
Upon hearing Wang’s self-immolation, his wife and daughter who were
“arrested for unfurling banners at Tiananmen for Falun Gong” did not “express an iota of
sadness.” The wife even applauded his behavior, saying “he is great and I am so proud of
him!”
585

273
Mr. Wang was portrayed as suffering from self-induced split-personality. “The first
time his wife and daughter were arrested, he almost wept,” only to be stiffened by the
wife’s encouragements. The wife’s tenacity and determination was said to be “stronger
than Wang’s.”
586
Captivity narratives like to feature how “dissociation” and
“disengagement” from the normalcy of life diminish one’s capacity for rational
decision-making. In conclusion, the official media report spoke of the family as
collectively inflicted with mental illnesses: “(It is) a family of psychopaths!”
587

Between the Leader and the Followers: Varying Agency and Accountabilities

Accountability in cult-related deviancy can be explored from two perspectives: the
degree to which they function as active cult promoters and the differential paces of
“waking-up” which indicate the depth of their involvement and hence culpability.

If the religious identity is a newly adopted role or only assumes marginal importance,
dropping it does not pose a hard dilemma. Accordingly, the 12-year-old who was
socialized into Falun Gong by her mother gave it up the minute she felt the physical pain
of burning. The state media reported that she “was crying to the police at Tiannamen:
‘Save me, uncle policeman! Save me!”
588
“Mom lied to me,” she confessed in her
hospital bed to a TV reporter.
589
Similarly, the 19-year-old repented on TV soon after
the self-immolation took place, with cameras rolling in her ward and a group of people
274
looking on.
590
For the mature and the more entrenched devotees whose “entanglement in
the cult” was deeper, they were described as having used their religious identity to restrict
other roles (businessman, teacher, mother, father, etc). Consequently, for the two
remaining adults of the group of self-immolators, their leave-taking from their former
affiliation came especially difficult. Ms. Hao, the 48-year-old mother who was a music
teacher, took almost a year to “regain her senses.” Unlike the feeble-willed women and
children, the only male involved, mastermind Wang Jindong, was said to be resistant,
going on hunger-strikes in post-self-immolation custody, and wearing a “defiant smile”
when he stood trial for murder.
591

Agent-hood is defined in terms of “consciousness,” the exercise of free judgment and
free will. Obviously, being in control of actions, taking the initiatives to abet others’
self-immolation, and consciously foraging into a forbidden realm –the Tiananmen Square
in this case, indicated a “willful” act on the part of the agent which in turn had grave
consequences. As Burke would say, willful act engenders harsher reaction by society. So,
just as the state media described Wang as a capable agent cum mastermind, so the justice
system slapped him with a harsh sentence of 15 long years. In a way, he was compared to
a “lieutenant of the devil.” The 48-year-old mother and the 19-year-old daughter were
said to be “deceived into burning” and hence exempted, plus their severe disfigurement
was punishment enough. The 12-year-old was an embodiment of innocence stolen by the
devil, a victim in the utmost sense. The defector was also thought of a capable and
275
responsible agent of act --- “being the one coming up with the idea of using Sprite bottle
because it concealed the color of gasoline,” but was “exempted from sentencing” on
account of self-mortification hastily and publicly performed: “She had acknowledged her
crime,” the court said.
592

Mr. Wang, in a little more than a year’s time, did commit apostasy. Crying
remorsefully on TV, he said “not a day has gone by without me thinking of how to make
amends to” the other self-immolators.
593
Once truly remorseful of his role in inciting
others to commit suicide, he then made it a mission of his own to expose the “evilness” of
his former affiliation. Comparing the result of his deprogramming as “a new birth,” Mr.
Wang’s newly gained fervor as a cult-buster mirrored his past devotion to his old belief.
He eventually carved out a career of public speaker and professional “cult crusader,”
sending wife and daughter to UN for testimonies and earning reduction in his sentence.
594

His “waking-up” was eagerly embraced by the official media which turned it into
material for another round of “anti-cult campaign.” The propaganda machine needed one
central evil-doer-turned-repentant and found one in Mr. Wang, whose agency of doing
bad was matched by his ability of doing good.

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Victimizing the “Hijacked” Cult Followers

Although Wang had more “agent-hood” in organizing and executing the
self-immolation, there was a sense that they were all “victims of the cult.” The standard
captivity narrative in the official account faulted Falun Gong for their actions.
“Hoodwinked by the malicious fallacies of …the Falun Gong founder, they plotted the
appalling suicidal blaze at Tiananmen Square,” reiterated the official Xinhua News
Agency.
595
Scholars have argued that apostates have to stress “the potent, external
forces” because one way of self-absolution is through embracing an “explanation of
psychological manipulation and mind control” that allegedly cause the behavior in
question.
596
Self-immolators are to various degrees already understood to be victims of
life and their psychological failings. Adding to the harsh reality was the coercive
persuasion implemented by the cult. In fact, they are as excusable as the cult is
controlling. Hence, having once defected, both the musician mother and mastermind
Wang claimed they were “wronged” and “abused” and were not “themselves.” For
instance, the 48-year-old mother recalled, “I didn’t know what had gotten into me then. I
was so obsessed to a degree that I couldn’t control myself and lost my usual sound
judgment.”
597
Wang the organizer blamed it on “Mr. Li Hongzhi’s writings” which had
so inspired him: “From his (Li’s) books I learned that this is not our real life so I burned
myself to achieve a higher state of fulfillment. Now I feel self-deceived!”
598
Whatever
277
the truth value of Wang’s remarks, his confession and condemnation--- “you have turned
us all into robots!”
599
-- received institutional support and was touted as representative of
Falun Gong’s nature in general. As Shupe writes, apostates’ narratives are given credence
and legitimacy “not necessarily because they are ‘true’…but because they serve the
propaganda/discrediting needs of counter-groups.”
600
Doing so not only accomplished a
symbolic restitution for Wang himself, but, on behalf of the state-sponsored anti-cult
coalition, performed a symbolic killing. Shifting the blame helped extenuate Wang’s guilt
as his agent-hood was marred in being turned into “a robot.”

Aside from mastermind Wang Jindong, the other self-immolators’ victimhood was
more justified. The state media consistently addressed them as “victims,” “patients” and
“survivors.” “You are victims yourself,” a staff from China’s Family Anti-Cult
organization said to the musician mother, admonishing that they have a “survivor’s
responsibility to forewarn other victims.”
601
By Burke’s account, an act as a result of
compulsion or sickness does not implicate one in moral consequences. Parsons argued
that being sick means that the medical deviant enter the role of “sanctioned aberrance” to
be exempt from legal punishments.
602
In treating the “self-immolation survivors,”
medicine as an institution was highlighted instead of justice or law. The Tiananmen
self-immolation fiasco was shown to be eventually reigned in by the orderliness of a
hospital. Befitting their patient and survivor statuses, therapeutic and rehab images filled
the story space: the musician mother and daughter were given “a quiet single family
278
house equipped with several heaters against the biting cold;” a “teddy bear” and other
adornments were there for enhanced domesticity; they had “free home appliances
allocated by the government” for their convenience. All “the patients” were “grateful”
that they were provided with “free medications and psych counseling.”
603
Recalcitrant
mastermind Wang’s eventual turn-around and recovery also took place in a hospital
setting, where the “enthusiasm and care from the doctors and nurses” finally “softened”
him.
604
The state media portrayed the female immolators in a particularly sympathetic
and pitiable tone, deploring the feminine beauty they once had which was lost in the fire.
According to Wright, “the ‘treatment’ of ex-members isn’t simply a reintegration
function for the sick” but a lucrative venue for medical professionals in alliance with
counter-cult coalition; “it is (also) a powerful niche from which to wage a political
campaign against NRMs.”
605
In the Chinese context, the “sick” labeling was meant to set
forth the “leniency” of the government. Channeling social control to the venue of
medicine also harkened back to an era where political abuse of psychiatry and medicine
was common practice.

Rescuing the Hostages

In captivity narratives, the ones on trial were not “the sick” and “the victimized”
ex-members, nor the repressive policy driving believers to the brink of despair, but the
NRMs allegedly doing harms through brainwashing and mind control. The presence of
279
hostages necessitates intervening measures of rescue and war, and the real war should be
waged between the champion of the weak (usually the state) and the arch-devil stealing
people’s souls. To the extent that NRMs are perceived as menacing forces, there exists an
equivocation as to whether they should be considered scenic elements (scene) or evil
agents with superb agency (agent).

I want to argue that sometimes the official discourse exhibited a “scenic” perspective as
they allocated a mysterious, almost supernatural power to “the cult.” Even for someone
as capable as Mr. Wang the organizer, who “turned a non-descript small shop into a
thriving business,” or as sophisticated and highly educated as Ms. Hao the musician, “an
elite student from Henan University,” they were no match for the ruthless and beguiling
“cult.” The captivity rhetoric implied that just by chancing upon “the cult” on their way,
they were bound to fall. All their intelligence and capabilities considered, including
cautions offered by family and friends, were to be defeated by the mere contact with “the
cult.” Just like Birdsell’s analysis of the Reagan speech, despite the troops’ “special
activity, and routine procedures or personal traits,” the deceptive scene in Beirut “exerts
principle control over the people encompassed within it” and those involved are
“incapable of dealing of the scene or recognizing its danger.”
606

By withholding concrete explanations as to the exact methods used by “the cult,” the
propaganda discourse purposefully shrouded Falun Gong in an air of mystery. Were there
280
any hypnosis, “trance-induced sessions” or “ego-destruction mechanism” involved? The
official media was mum in that regard. By focusing only on the effect of “the cult”
evident in the severely distorted human forms, “the cult” was impersonalized into a
scene-like figure beyond human intelligibility, something akin to random danger and
unreason, having no logic, being malignant without a purpose, almost like a wall. The
goal, I surmise, was not to salvage the integrity of the hostages (as Reagan did with the
US troops), for there was already little integrity left of those “patients” stripped of agency,
but to make “the other” unspeakably threatening. An intellectual from an elite Chinese
think tank once told me that he didn’t want to have anything to do with Falun Gong
because he thought it was so overpoweringly contagious that touching it meant
embarking on a trip of no return.
607

Yet, the official discourse chose to assign a sense of “agent-hood” to Falun Gong when
it sought to blame the group for invading families and stole the children away – after all,
it was the “cult’s doings” that individuals were reduced to slaves and robots. At any rate,
regardless if the enemy poses as a “scene” or an “ill-willed agent,” it could not outsmart
the true champion of people’s welfare, the guardian of society, and the protector of the
weak and vulnerable. “We” – the state-led anti-cult collation, was supposed to be the
genuine driving force and determining factor in this war, wearing multiple hats of a
rescuer, warrior, and parent.

281
The war between the cult and the anti-cult movement was waged on many fronts. If
“the cult” was bent on “destroying life and health,” the medical establishment was there
to save life. To clean up the chaos left at Tiananmen, the official media reported that “A
rescue team formed, comprising well-known doctors. Special wards were prepared for
around-the-clock monitoring. Doctors and nurses on holiday returned to work
immediately. Nearly 10, 000 milliliters of plasma and several thousand milliliters of
blood were sent to the operation room.”
608
As the doctors and nurses aligned their
resources to undo the effect of the cult, authorities in law enforcement were mobilized.
While the cult wanted to wreak havoc “on the most festival day of the year,” i.e. the
Chinese New Year Eve, and at “a sacred site, Tiananmen,” their plot of “disrupting
public order” was foiled by the police who “responded with lightening speed.”
609
To
contain the situation, security was subsequently maximized in proportion to the
importance of Tiananmen, “the heart of our Republic, the place the world’s eyes focus
on.”
610
“To tourists paying homage to Tiananmen this is a holy land, and to the patrolling
police, this is home,” and as such not to be sullied by the “defiling and disrupting cult.”
611

What’s more, those warriors were said to have “penetrating eyes like those of an eagle,”
and “firm, steely hands,” which could easily “restrain further moves of the
self-immolators” and “head off protests” and disruptions.
612
If the cult made one desert
one’s duty to family, turning one cold and dry, government agencies were there to serve
as a surrogate parent dedicated to reconstructing the warm milieu of a home and restore
the lost humanity – they stepped in as soon as those irresponsible blood parents left. One
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female officer at the detention center where Mr. Wang’s wife and daughter were detained
for protesting at Tiananmen was reportedly treating them just like family, giving Wang’s
wife “her own clothes” and addressing the daughter as “my child.” Wang’s wife and
daughter were eventually “moved to tears” and “repudiated the evil cult.”
613
The staff
treating Wang was also keen on breaking him by tending to his physical and emotional
needs. It was reported that when Wang refused to eat, they fed him newly squeezed juice;
when Wang missed his family, they hurriedly brought his wife and daughter over. “I was
like a hard and stubborn ice block melting in the warmth of the sun beams the state
officials have shone down on me,” wrote Wang.
614
In his final repentance tract, Wang
was said to have been bowled over by the kindness received: “I feel deeply grateful that
the government has been caring for me even better than my own father and mother.”
615

Where “the cult” stole children and destroyed parenthood, the state instantiated a
motherly role. They destroy, we rebuild; they kill, we heal; they take away, we replenish
– the state’s aggrandized agency was evident in a multi-thronged fight with the cult.

Conclusion

In the immediate aftermath of the self-immolation incident, Washington Post’s Philip
Pan wrote, “an intense battle is underway to answer that question [of who these
individuals are], with the five individuals cast in turn as victims of an evil cult, righteous
protesters against a repressive government or desperately estranged people on the
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margins of a fast changing society.”
616
At the outset of this chapter I asked a similar
question: how were these individuals portrayed by the state media that a heroic protest
was viewed not as such but another evidence of the “crime of the cult?” My answer is
that by emptying the political and moral “agent-hood” of the self-immolation participants
and tweaking the event into a prototypical “cult story” – one on “captivity,” the state
media successfully “depoliticized” these individuals as functional activists and figured
them instead as puppets and pawns of “the cult,” crazy, fanatic, obsessed with a
ridiculous religious prospect. “Depoliticization” went a long way for the Party-state:
What was at stake was no longer the interest of the government being challenged by a
dissenting group but the welfare of the ordinary citizens at large. “Mind control” – the
worst nightmare of religion was mobilized, “politics” was hollowed out, and “family”
and “health” made to look like in great danger. What had started out as Falun Gong’s
most sturdy appeal, i.e. its proclaimed benefits on health and its stance of being family
and community-friendly, was completely shattered in the instance of self-burning. No
longer a purveyor of health and self-betterment, Falun Gong was reconfigured a poison, a
devil, a family buster, a child murderer, in short, a “cult,” and the endangered citizenry
should seek the protection and guidance of the big brother to break the cult’s spell. Such
is the modus operandi of the topical movement in the official representation of the
self-immolation incident.

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The Falun Gong side responded to the self-immolation allegation by calling it one of
the “biggest lies CCP has ever told.”
617
Sentiments characteristic of reformists and loyal
oppositionists -- evidenced in Falun Gong’s health talks and apologetic explanations
following the 4/25 mass rally --- disappeared entirely. Alienated, Falun Gong embarked
on a confrontational course with the CCP until this day. Indeed, if Falun Gong did not set
out to be “the biggest challenge to the Party since 1989,” it has certainly grown into one,
thanks to the Party’s own effort of enemy-making.
285
Chapter Seven
Conclusion

This investigation has surveyed Falun Gong’s early developments through three
critical moments, namely its legitimation, controversy, and the climax of the propaganda
war in the self-immolation incident. The goal is to identify recurrent discursive patterns
and topical motifs and to illuminate the rhetorically structuring of the Falun Gong
identity vis-à-vis the Party-state. The purpose of this dissertation is to preserve a piece of
history (rather than attempt to generalize theory) and to shed light on characteristic social
action paradigm in an authoritarian single-party state where bucking the system demands
mastery of unconventional rhetorical skills.

This chapter recaps the rationale of the study, the conceptual premise and
procedures by which discoveries were made, and the insights produced by this
investigation. I will also discuss the limitations of this study and explore its implications
for future studies of rhetorical movements.

Developing a Critical Perspective: Topoi and Dramatism

This study was motivated by a perceived categorical confusion concerning Falun Gong
which equally affected the academics, the media, the Chinese state and the Falun Gong
286
movement alike. Upon closer examination, I found that the dispute over how to
characterize Falun Gong roughly revolve around four constructs, i.e. politics (“Falun
Gong is a political movement signaling a center of power outside of the Party rule”),
religion (“Falun Gong practitioners are religious believers demanding overdue freedom
of belief” or “Falun Gong is a superstition, a heresy, and a brainwashing ‘cult’ ”), health
(“Falun Gong, like Qigong, is a self-healing movement”), and family (“The dispute
between Falun Gong and the Chinese Communist Party resembles a family squabble” and
“Falun Gong is a family buster”). Not only are these constructs highly repetitive in Falun
Gong-related discourses, their employment and interpretation by the concerned discourse
community often a departure from their conventional usage. Based on this finding, I
surmise that the seemingly hodge-podge of discourses defining Falun Gong’s identity can
be simplified by seizing onto these four terms, which generate, gather and organize
discussions and debates in the capacity of topoi, their unconventional usage the result of
creative elaboration and interpretation by the participating rhetors who mobilize symbols
to meet their goals and needs.

To corroborate my conjecture that these four constructs are the main motifs deployed
to define Falun Gong, I surveyed past literatures on the same subject matter. Indeed,
previous scholarship aimed at defining Falun Gong fall along these four axes of
distinction, selectively approaching the Falun Gong phenomenon as one of religion,
politics, family, and health. Another tendency I have discerned in the existent scholarship
287
is that scholars and critics tend to situate Falun Gong according to their own disciplinary
biases which result in privileging one or two terms available in the Falun Gong debate at
the expense of other probable angles. In my view, doing so fails to penetrate the
“beguiling” appearance given off by the terministic screen composed of the four topoi : at
times, the rhetorical situation was such that one or two particular terms were saliently
mobilized and accentuated, overshadowing the existence of other terms equally present
but in muted tones. Moreover, scholars partial to preferred labels and approaches might
very likely ignore the fact that discursive constructs are motivated symbolic actions
which exhibit a spatial layout that changes over time, and that a social movement is a
multifaceted phenomenon and evolves in stages. Building upon as well as complementing
past scholarly findings, I chose not to ask the question of what Falun Gong “is” but
examined instead how it has come to appear as it does in its periodical definitions. It
required me to take a rhetorical perspective (as well as a social constructionist point of
view) and ask such questions as: Who said what? For what purpose? In what context?
With what rhetorical means? I believed that a rhetorical perspective on Falun Gong’s
definitional formation would afford a view on topoi not as static signifiers but symbolic
tactics motivated to address rhetorical exigencies.

My hypothesis is that we can trace Falun Gong’s discursive formation through the lens
of the four topoi as they crisscross synchronically in a spatial layout and mutate
diachronically. As building blocks of the discourse under study, topoi derive their
288
meanings from pre-established symbolic conventions (origin) and meanwhile are subject
to negotiation and change (outcome). A particular topic formation reflects the situation
the topoi are mobilized to address, the motives of the rhetor, and the rhetorical means at
the rhetor’s command. The form of the Falun Gong movement and its evolving
relationship with the Chinese state are also detectable in topoi’s historical transformation.

This study relies on two related theories: topic theory and dramatism. As a macro
theory dramatism is concerned with language and its corresponding social actions – it
highlights the “action” side of socio-linguistic deployment.
618
That is, it analyses terms
implicated in actions, terms about actions, and terms as actions (motives). To modify
Overton’s interpretation of Burke, as a method dramatism addresses the empirical
questions of how persons employ terms to explain, justify, or rationalize their actions to
themselves and persuade others, “what the cultural and social structural influence on
these explanatory (motivational) terms might be,” and “what effect connotational links
among the explanatory (motivational) terms might have on these explanations, and hence,
on action itself.”
619

Rhetorical movement is one particular form of dramatistic action in which the central
act is characterized by a “reciprocity” whereby rhetors and counter-rhetors interact and
clash. In this “dialectic enjoinment” -- the status quo vis-à-vis groups pushing for change,
institutions against uninstitutionalized collectives, dominant publics versus
289
counter-publics --- oppressions, accommodations, compromises and confrontations occur,
and misrecognition of the other’s motives and scene oftentimes contributes to escalating
conflict.
620
The master plot, or master motive, according to Kenneth Burke, revolves
around the establishment, breach, restoration and toppling of the Order, which
subsequently begets the ritual of Kill, Sacrifice, Victimization, Mortification and
Redemption. My investigation of Falun Gong’s discursive formation also plays out in this
state vs society framework. Given the formidable power of the Chinese state, Falun Gong
was faced with a daunting task to gain recognition and survive as it tried to build itself.
The movement’s motives revolved around negotiating and/or countering the state’s
influence.

If dramatism illuminates the “dynamics” of the movement, topoi shed light on the
structural fabric of the movement rhetoric; the former highlights the “drive” and “plot” of
the discourse, while the latter are the concrete substances being moved around. A
complete understanding of rhetorical movement requires the combination of them both.

Topic theory is usually traceable to Aristotle’s conception of topoi as “seats of
arguments” and “places of invention.” Topoi in Aristotelian theory refer both to universal
attributes of things, general classification methods and common lines of reasoning
(“common place”), and conventional, field-specific knowledge (“doxa”).
621
In recent
years, taking into account the creativity involved in inventional processes, rhetorical
290
scholars argue that instead of viewing topoi as “static” constructs, we should highlight the
“motivated” and “situated” aspects of topoi. For instance, Virginia Holland regards topoi
to be symbolic “naming” animated in response to a situation and this strategic “naming”
comes in “all of its attitudinal implications.”
622
She writes:

For example, for the purpose of invention, a speaker might go to the “place” or
“topic” of patriotism. And, acting it attitudinally, emerge – depending upon which of
the two general responses he decided to make to the situation – with a strategy of
“flag-waving” or “debunking.”

Although simple, Holland’s example helps illustrate the characteristics of topoi: a
situation (national crisis) calls for the appearance of “patriotism” which is the customary
motif befitting the situation. Yet the topic of “patriotism” is only a locus with uncertain
outcome which is yet to be determined by the rhetor’s attitude (“debunking” or
“veneration”). The motivated outcome of topical movement is the product of convention
and invention. It is worth noting that topics/terms are not only embedded in rhetorical
situations but locked in with each other through their “connotative links,” or the sense of
what properly goes with what. Burke suggests that for terms to convince the audience, a
finite number of related linguistic constructs must cluster and cohere like a web,
corresponding to the things (which exist in a similar relation) they symbolize and rooted
in the structure of human psyche.
623
Ethical evaluations are embedded in and conveyed
291
through these connotative linkages.

Michael Leff notes that “the term ‘topic’ is notoriously ambiguous, and even in its
technical uses, its meaning ranges from recurrent themes appearing in a certain kind of
discourse to abstract patterns of inference.”
624
It is in my interest to leave topoi creatively
ambiguous and half full, of elastic perimeters as constitutive units of discourse. They can
be seen as the framework and scheme of thinking which organizes and frames, the locus
and container which works by way of gathering and evoking, and the resultant themes,
arguments and narratives thus gathered which frequently occur in a genus of discourse.
The four topics culled from the Falun Gong discourse, i.e. “politics,” “religion,” “health,”
and “family,” provide stock images and familiar themes, signal conventional patterns of
thinking, work as culturally resonant strategies to meet a rhetorical problem, and issue
ethical commands to the concerned audiences. Together they comprise a terministic
screen of mutable shapes, giving momentary prevalence to one or two terms (while
shadowing the rest); their arrangement is shorthand of the situation they are animated to
address, and a reflection of the relationship of the rhetor with the world. I believe that
through analyzing topoi in dramatistic actions, we can gain insights into the motives of
the rhetoricians, the political culture in which they are grounded, and the form the
movement has to assume.

292
Recapping the Chapters

The first chapter argued that much of the previous scholarship seeking to situate Falun
Gong was clouded by scholars’ own disciplinary propensity and that the labels employed
by participants in the Falun Gong debate were in fact rhetorical strategies, sometimes
“ruses” to modify or sustain a situation. In place of arguing for the “right” label, I offered
a rhetorical perspective to put all terms/topoi – four of them – in a dynamic and
dramatistic play spanning several decades and through a few moments. I projected that
the utility of this method would uncover the periodical shifts of the rhetorical situation
and shed light on the terministic permutation pertinent to the Falun Gong movement. I
noted that both the Falun Gong movement and the government (the status quo vs the
change group) jointly participated in the creation of meaning, with the government
definitely being the more vocal and dominant party. Although pinpointing the moment of
shifts is risky, for the sake of convenience the movement’s trajectory can be divided into
three stages: health (as a legitimate self-healing movement), controversy (as a political
enemy of the state, an ideological contender and an unruly child), and “cult” (which is
pulled off in the “self-immolation” incident).

A most flexible conception of topoi was advanced in accordance with the concept’s
characteristic “elusiveness” as a rhetorical construct. Topoi could be recurrent themes
or subjects of argument, the “places” generative of arguments, propositions and
293
narratives, stocks of readily available imageries the audience relate to, proverbial
knowledge functioning as warrant for propositions, or hierarchical orders based on which
identities are forged and conflicts resolved. The only thing certain about topoi is that they
recur as culturally identifiable units of discourse (convention) and are generative of
arguments (invention).

The second chapter reviewed the four topoi in contemporary Chinese context. Doing
so laid out the symbolic ecology in which they were to operate and their mobilization
potentials. Citing historical examples, I suggested that in an authoritarian system
“politics” as a label is something to be feared and avoided; it deters outright political
actions; and “politicization” is a prevalent phenomenon underlying most aspects of social
life, being the hidden premise of all the other terms. I also argued that in a strange twist
of the matter, “politics” as a linguistic entity is “unmarked” in public discussions if things
are “going alright;” its physical emergence in official discourses often signals the
appearance of challengers and dissidents awaiting political flaks. In short, “politics” is a
repressive term. “Health,” by virtue of its proximity with “science” and corporeality,
carries with it an aura of political correctness which authorizes and endorses like a
God-term. The versatility of “health” enables it to be elaborated as a metaphor for
political activities, religious pursuits, and actions concerning the family. I proposed a
structural reading on China’s religious landscape as consisting of three related terms, i.e.
“science,” “superstition” and “religion.” Despite common perception of an officially
294
atheistic country, “religion” in and of itself carries no negative connotation; it stands for a
“neutral” phenomenon protected by the Chinese Constitution. The scope of “religion” is
under official purview and only incorporates five recognized world faiths. Between
“religion” and “superstition,” the latter signals “dirty” and illegitimate theistic orders, a
floating signifier and a mobile ax poised to hit whatever “science” (as well as “Marxism”)
is mobilized against. Just as “superstition” is a penalizing category, so is “science” an
ideologically glorified God-term, standing for “progress,” “modernity,” and “all that is
good and useful.” Spiritual systems situated in the religious grey area always want to
curry favor with “science” while steering clear of “superstition.” “Family” is also a
malleable construct which can refer to a sphere housing a set of activities, sentiments,
relationships, and rules and regulations; actions launched in the name of “family” carry
with them a sense of urgency and sanctity. Rhetorically, “family” is an inviolable term
just as “health” and “science” are holy, and rhetoricians always want to draw on these
God-terms for persuasive power. In addition to explicating their separate meanings,
Chapter 2 also revealed the probable connotative links among the topoi which
collectively constitute the vocabulary to account for, justify, and mobilize actions
pertaining to Qigong and Falun Gong. Put together, the four topoi permits “a methodical
inquiry into cycles or clusters of terms and their functions” which according to Kenneth
Burke points to the “the most direct route to the study of human relations and human
motives.”
625

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In addition to projecting how a semi-religious movement might position itself in this
symbolic milieu, I also illuminated the rhetorical culture characteristic of a (at least
nominally) Marxist-Leninist regime and how this culture might impact social actions
undertaken. Burke regards Marxism as promoting a rhetorical ethos of “speaking ill” in
civil matters.
626
The heavy-handedness with which Beijing rules its subjects is proof to
Burke’s proposition. Under authoritarianism recognized and overt political activities are
off limits to the general public and open endeavors in this regard entail a high price.
Political oppressiveness not only impedes free speech but fosters a speech ethics
privileging those well versed in ingenious linguistic gymnastics (to dodge harm) and
those who speak less. Part of the goal of this dissertation is to illuminate a subaltern
counter-public and the creative means with which arguments can be made without being
censored and voices can be heard without triggering the ire of the police state. It means
that survival, gaining legitimacy and staying safe come first before a movement can utter
an alternative agenda.

The third chapter addressed the first moment on the trajectory -- legitimating Qigong
out of which Falun Gong arose, and examined the few legitimating devices Qigong and
Falun Gong resorted to. The rhetorical problem to be solved, back in the early 1950s and
again in the late 1970s, was to justify Qigong’s legitimacy through forging alliances with
endorsing terms such as “health” and “science.” To that end, the medical authorities
managed to server Qigong from its “superstitious” origin (in Taoism and/or folk religions)
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and recuperated its physical side as Qigong therapy. Championed by powerful political
patrons, Qigong was revamped as a socialist “health” practice and medical institution
which managed to subdue and subsume the impure “superstitious” component. Later on,
the self-healing regimens contained in Qigong, once brought outside professional clinical
arena, became a type of mass sport. The deterministic move that connected Qigong to
“science” and decidedly removed it from the ranks of “quackery and parlor tricks” came
by when credentialed scientists from elite institutes were able to verify the materiality of
“Qi.” Thanks to those Qigong proponents who were themselves either scientific
heavyweights or top-ranked officials in the central government, Qigong gradually
acquired the label of “human body science,” and was lauded as marking a triumph of
“China’s national science” more advanced than Western science paradigm. Up to that
point, Qigong moved from something less than science to equal to or even, better than,
science. During this topical movement, Qigong and Falun Gong relied on the support of
political patrons and conformed to dominant political ideology; it became “politically
correct” once it secured a cover of respectability through connection with health and
science, with religion pushed off the compass. I also indicated in chapter 3 that Qigong’s
success was a temporary one. It was like a truce fraught with tension, always at risk of
being broken apart by criticism from the orthodox Marxist camp that wanted to rip the
cover of Qigong and drive it back to “superstition” from which it hailed.

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Once obtained the cover of respectability, Qigong and Falun Gong were poised to
build themselves. The fourth chapter switched gears from querying institutional
legitimation through health to trying to unravel the polysemy and function of “health”
from an insider’s point of view. The rationale was to understand the appeal of Qigong
and Falun Gong to individuals drawn to them, who were grounded in China’s
post-Cultural Revolution and Post-Tiananmen period. I suggested that once the debate
regarding Qigong and Falun Gong’s legitimacy reached a stasis, with little need to defend
themselves, practitioners of these healing arts set out to expand and appropriate the
meaning of “health.” I wanted to tease out the rich interiors of the natives as they lived,
enacted and remade the health construct and examine how the scope of “health”
expanded to accommodate multiple, individuated meanings. The time period is from
early 1980s to late 1990s when the whole country was infatuated with the Qigong
phenomenon and Qigong’s peak membership ranked something of 200 millions.

My investigation discovered that the versatility of health was able to mediate and
express other topics, topics people were at a loss to discuss verbally. Once functioned as
a legitimating tool, health pursuits and health talks now functioned as a safety valve
releasing political bitterness and mediating religious aspirations. Revealed in the
practitioners’ health narratives were oblique but abundant political and religious
references. In the meantime, the human drama of naming the evil and transcending the
guilt was rewritten as socio-political grievances crossed into the bodies and got spewed
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out in physical ailments. The Chinese body was turned into a platform where
psycho-somatic illnesses made implicit commentary on societal injustice. The macro
health of the body politic was metaphorically and materially evident in the micro
conditions of its populace, and found treatment through embodied therapeutics. I
argued that the body’s linguistic muteness somehow put it at an advantage of expressing
subalterns’ hidden transcript. Such oblique naming through the body was followed by
more “vocal” criticism mediated by Falun Gong’s notion of “karma,” which outlines a
code of ethics (moral health and material health rolled into one) for Falun Gong believers
while focusing attention on the moral state of China. All in all, Qigong and Falun Gong’s
spiritual, political and civic implications were realized through “health” as it was lived
and appropriated by concerned individuals and groups.

The good time was soon over and thus began the period of crisis. On April 25, 1999,
the order was breached as over 10,000 Falun Gong followers staged a silent sit-in (a
“petition” in their word) outside the Chinese leadership compound. “Health” was no
longer able to encompass the rhetorical situation; the pressing matter at hand was how to
write off the “guilt” triggered in the protest. I argued in Chapter 5 that the government
saw two underlying orders violated in Falun Gong’s mass protest: One concerned the
religio-political order (challenge from a faith-based political organization similar to the
Party’s mode of governance which is founded on Marxism), and the other domestic polity
(“children challenging the authority of parents and elders”). The strategy Beijing
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employed to restore the order was through reasserting its authority in an act of
“victimage,” which saw the animation of three topoi, i.e. politics, family and religion.
Again and again, in the onslaught of official campaign, Falun Gong’s rebellious status
was identified and condemned; they were allowed one option of redemption only: repent
and bow to the established authority that was religious, paternalistic and political in one.

Religio-polity and domestic polity governed the “mystery” of the system which stayed
shrouded when social equilibrium was undisturbed. Falun Gong’s spontaneous uprising
ripped open the mystery’s cover, yet the movement was not ready to proactively expose
the system as a system. On the contrary, they subscribed to the same established lines of
thinking, which was testament to the indoctrinating power of the “Communist Party
Culture.”
627
First, Falun Gong did not challenge the government’s penetration into
private beliefs by claiming that faith “is a matter which lies solely between Man and his
God” and that “he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship.”
628
There
seemed to be a tacit agreement that the state could with legitimacy reach into the realm of
thoughts and opinions. It was never an issue of whether the government had jurisdiction –
apparently it did, but a matter of “you got the wrong guy,” for Falun Gong contended that
it was a “good practice” (as opposed to “evil ones”), had “positive impacts on society”
and therefore should be exempt from political persecution. Second, Falun Gong seemed
to consent to their role of “children” in the domestic order. Their rhetorical stance was
that of “wronged and misunderstood children” cautioning and criticizing “the erroneous
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parents” with the best of intensions. In retrospect, “religion” in its institutional
implications and institutional protection was not a term officially available to Falun Gong
(nor did it occur to Falun Gong to formally request to be granted as one), which hindered
the movement from staking claims on the ground of freedom of belief. The derogatory
connotations embedded in “politics” led Falun Gong to refrain from identifying itself as a
dissident political group. With the canopy of “health” in tatters and (contentious)
“politics” and (official) “religion” off bounds, Falun Gong was left with little in way of
positive positioning. Struggling to find a label to justify its existence to the non-practicing
public, some Falun Gong rhetors did revert to the (then largely defunct) label of “health;”
confronted with the propaganda barrages, the movement cited its loyalty as a subject.
Although such efforts turned out to be of little avail under China’s intense political
circumstances, the movement’s motive accounted for why in counter-rhetoric they chose
to mobilize “family” to solve the dispute and hung onto “health” as ground of
identification.

Falun Gong did not fold soon enough as the government hoped and the conflict
escalated. Faced with less than satisfactory reception (evident in the poor ratings) and
pressure from the global community, the propaganda organ had to invent a better story, a
story which would not give accidental credit to those protestors as either “abused
victims” or even worse, “resistant heroes.” So it went for a line of “de-politicization:” a
“self-immolation” incident was crafted to demonstrate that what was at stake was no
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longer the government’s power being challenged and taken away; what was at stake was
the welfare and sanity of the ordinary folks who would go berserk at the instigation of a
“cult.” Falun Gong was no longer figured as an enemy of the state (political topos) or an
unruly child (family topos), but a very poison detrimental to health and family which
were the wards of the state. Whether the self-immolation incident was staged or not, the
government went for the throat by picking on and debunking “health” which had been
known as Falun Gong’s strongest point. The movement’s “health” appeal was completely
annihilated in this critical blow, as it was recast from a health purveyor to health risk. In
the mean time, governing the sanity of the populace was reassigned to the guard of the
state. All four topoi were intensely mobilized to deliver this “cult story:” a fanatic and
brainwashing belief stole people’s autonomy and compelled them to harm their own
health and family which called for the invention of the big brother.

The occurrence of the so-called self-immolation incident and the media’s subsequent
exploitation of the same event signaled the end of “family squabble” which I used to
define pre-self-immolation conflict; hopes of resolving the dispute within the family were
dashed, as the movement felt completely undermined and alienated from the mainstream
community. Angered, it ceased its conciliatory stance of a loyal oppositionist and chose
to become a full-fledged counter-regime force. This incident also rewrote the dynamics
of state vs. society, as a third party – “captives of the cult” – was inserted between the
two. That is, the dispute no longer concerned the contention between the state and
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rebelling society, but was about a war waged between an evil-doer, the naive and
innocent who were easy preys, and the righteous defender represented by the state.

“Self-immolation” marked the third moment on Falun Gong’s evolving trajectory.
With this incident Falun Gong’s early developmental arc had reached a full circle: A
movement started as “health” also ended at “health.” Confronted with a labeling crisis,
Falun Gong was compelled to break free of the semiotic restrictions inherent in the topoi
and adopt a more explicitly political and religious stance – which it did in its subsequent
transformation. The dramatistic plot of this period under study did not follow the now
familiar three-stage structure of successful movements. In place of “inception, rhetorical
crisis and consummation,” the final stage halted in a deadlock, an impasse showing little
sign of resolution. The three moments examined in chapter 3 through 6 clearly
corroborated the thesis raised in chapter 1: Topoi in dramatistic plot and formation are
shorthand of rhetorical situations which call for them as symbolic responses; their
deployment and elaboration embody rhetors’ relationship with the world; one can
uncover the motives and the pattern of a movement through tracing topic formation and
transformation. Indeed, as Burke states, the cluster of terms in dramatistic enactment
provides “the most direct route to the study of human relations and human motives.”
629

Tracing the topics in formation and transformation also allows me to confirm the
projection I made in chapter 2 concerning the meaning and utility of each topos. Of the
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four, “politics” has been demonstrated to be an omnipotently determining term which is
negative and deterring in function. “Health,” by virtue of its proximity to “science,”
endorses and justifies; its malleability enables it to be elaborated as a metaphor for
political, spiritual, and moral engagements. “Religion” affords a degree of institutional
protection to those officially recognized as such, while the “dirty” theistic systems are
politicized and incorporated into “superstition,” a devil-term antithetical to “science.”
“Superstition” penalizes and repels as much as “science” rewards and elevates. A
movement needs to be in favor of “science” and “health” and distant from “politics” and
“superstition” to gain official legitimacy. “Family” encompasses a realm characterized by
authority, seniority, discipline, obligation, love and inviolable sacredness, a term
informing a polity’s self-understanding as well as an inventive resource for anti-cult
narratives. Through maneuvering and arranging the topoi in varying terministic
formations, rhetors sought to change or maintain the situation. The movement of the
topoi also offers a glimpse of the political culture they drive relevance from: the status
quo paranoid about losing control; the authorities that grudge accommodating requests
from below; the speech ethics fostering an attitude of “speaking ill” and “speaking loud”
(as in top-down propaganda discourses); a system still occasionally indulged in the belief
that its reigning ideology is absolutely correct and “scientific;” and a resourceful citizenry
apt at “intra-politics” that is intrinsically democratic and will have an effect on society
being more open, just, and participatory.

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Implications and Limitations

This dissertation finishes near China’s once-in-a-decade power transition where the
so-called “fifth-generation leaders” are set to take over the reins of the most populous
country in the world. Over the past three decades, in spite of phenomenal economic
growth, China’s economic reform is not matched by political liberation. The widening
gap of wealth, the increasing number of social protests, and the ever more vocal voices
on the social media --- all sorts of signs indicate that people feel they deserve more rights
and demand political reform once their “bellies are full.” Those ground-up requests,
however, are not proactively met, for the security state has shown little effort at
slackening off its conventional high-handedness. With “stability,” or weiwen, being the
mantra, it is still common practice for the authorities and their agents to beat up protestors,
arrest activists, and scrub the Internet of “offensive” remarks. China’s giant stature in the
world has rendered old-school authoritarianism all the more conspicuous and
insufferable.

Falun Gong’s early action grammar both answered the need for ground-up political
changes and the necessity to remain safe from state harassment. Its rise had to do with the
tacit recognition of discontent which found relief valves in healing exercises and Qigong
sports. It was also a “subtle” movement by the subalterns who at first chose not to “shout
out” in the street but “whisper” in the corner. Of course, gradually, what started as
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chatters ended up galvanizing and evolving into outright political and moral
confrontation.

The uniqueness of the communicative acts involved in pulling off a subtle movement
deserves further explorations. To be more exact, the rhetorical practices involved in
embodied healing activities and the subsequently generated recollections exhibit
distinctive substance, style, and mode of communication which call for further
investigations and have implications for rhetorical studies and movement pedagogy.
630

In the following section, I will describe the uniqueness of the communicative acts before
discussing their significance for rhetorical analysis as a discipline and practical art.

Traditionally, rhetoric is conceptualized as leader-dominated discursive action
targeting a group of passive, presumably pre-constituted audiences. As Campbell
succinctly summarizes, “Persuasion is enthymematic adaption to audience norms and
values.”
631
The mode of communication, however, is different for practitioners of
self-healing methods: They converse in leaderless small groups where individual stories
and personal experiences are validated and consumed as part of group therapy. Using
others as lenses, appreciative listeners try to find their own footings. In a horizontal
structure such as this, everyone is invited to share, to find selves through the
“ego-constitutive” function of rhetoric.
632
Rhetorical transactions among Qigong and
Falun Gong practitioners do not involve patterns of “public discussion” for the purpose of
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“altering…the environment;”
633
rather, they function as a vehicle of private expression
and communication for the redefinition and betterment of unique selves. In place of a
uniformly conceived audience, individuality and idiosyncrasy are sanctioned and
encouraged via individuated self-healing experiences and the following
existentially-tinged narratives. Through disclosing ambiguities, bitterness and sufferings
at the root of bodily conditions, Qigong-inspired illness talks enable an emotive catharsis
which allows one to expose and reconstitute self while inviting others to participate and
bond. Affects and sensuality are considered significant communication content in
service of self-exploration. Participants of such communicative behaviors attach great
importance to what they do and what they share. Just as Maurice Natanson suggests,
“genuine argument” should open one to “the immediacy of the self’s world of feeling,
attitude, and the total subtle range of its affective and cognitive sensibility,” and that
“feeling is a way of meaning as much as thinking is a way of formulating.”
634
On the
ground of substance, style, and goal, rhetorical acts by Qigong groups are at a far remove
from what’s commonly presumed to be classical rhetoric forms.

The uniqueness of “private, expressive, and horizontal” communication can be further
elucidated through a comparison of contemporary meaning-making groups and
conventional rhetorical movements that regard the function of language differently. As
far as the classical movement (such as labor movement) model is concerned, language is
considered to be an instrument deployed to devise messages, recruit members and plot
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strategies for the purpose of instigating institutional changes. Contemporary movements
– exemplified in the women’s movement and other movements bearing self-healing and
self-empowerment streaks – regard the primary function of language to be a tool to “raise
consciousness” (instead of crafting unified party lines) and “construct reality.” More
importantly, language (representation) is viewed not as a means to an end but an end in
and of itself, the very battle being fought for. To borrow insights from Alain Touraine:

These (new social) movements are opposed to the large organizations that have the
capacity to produce, distribute, and impose languages, information, and
representations bearing upon nature, social order, individual and collective life. . . .
[T]he new social movements deal with problems that are practically excluded from
public life and that are taken to be private. They take positions on health, sexuality,
information, and communication, and on the relation of life and death.
635

Touraine’s remarks touch on the core of contemporary controversies where social actors
contend that personal is political and have made their primary goal to dispute the
communicative and definitional hegemony of the public realm. Akin to a tug of war,
social agents resist the intrusion of the public as the latter makes inroads into the former
through economic policy, legal measures and representational privilege.
636

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In view of the “personal,” “expressive” and “meaning-making” orientations embedded
in Qigong and Falun Gong-related practices, rhetorical analysis should sharpen its senses.
First, it should expand what could be considered suitable rhetorical data.

By choice, rhetorical practices inspired by Qigong and Falun Gong take place in the
immediacy of life-world and characterized by mundane, repetitive and fluid actions.
Barely featuring the kind of stable and reified “text” bounded in documents and speeches
amenable to conventional rhetorical analysis, what reigns is a combination of disparate
embodied actions, localized perceptions, and individuated affects filtered through, made
by and remaking significant cultural symbols. Rhetorical analysis, in this regard, should
step outside its “textual biases” and be tuned to heed the phenomenologically meaningful
from the natives’ point of view by being sensitive to the ordinary and the mundane.

Second, rhetorical analysis should help discover the “public” in apparently private
communications, and help bridge the gap between the macro (structural) and micro
(personal).

Rhetoric is concerned with “public” discussions. Take small group identity-related
communications for example (like in a group therapy session): If the subject matter has
only to do with personal experiences, it should belong to psychological inquiry as
opposed to rhetorical. Although having a personal and expressive component, new social
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movements are fitting data for rhetorical movement studies because they display a
“dual-goaled” “oscillation” between the grassroots and the socio-political structure.
637
In
Campbell’s words, on the one hand personal statements “spell out the meaning and
consequences” of structural conditions “in concrete, personal, affective terms,” and on
the other “structural analyses and empirical data permit” us to “generalize from
individual experiences to” discourses dealing with the legal, economic, and social aspect
responsible for the public exigency.
638
Such a generalization is critical, because without
the “transcendence (from the personal to the public)…, there’s no persuasive campaign,
no rhetoric in any public sense.”
639
Elaborating Campbell, Michell states that these “two
levels of movement activity” are preconditions for each other, and “shifting back and
forth between the terrains of institutional politics and civil society” is part of the “critical
pedagogy of the new social movement.”
640

I would argue that Qigong-engendered communications are rhetorical as they
contained the seeds of the “dialectic tension growing out of moral conflict” which in time
did erupt into the public sphere.
641
The seemingly personal stories and expressive
discourses surfacing in Qigong and Falun Gong are not something devoid of social
significance -- we are able to identify the rhetorical and public components in them.
Qigong-inspired conversations are a “shared” discourse which helped practitioners to
constitute a group identity -- one that does not just revolve around personal conditions but
underscores a prevalent “social” disease and “social” suffering. I assert that for Qigong
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followers, although frequently at a loss to lucidly verbalize their sentiments and thoughts,
there was at least a vague awareness that what seem to be personal pains and deficiencies
have been created by something bigger, a result of larger societal factors and historical
conditions not necessarily of their own making. A “movement” can be identified as
people move from victims of the past to combatants of socially inflicted illnesses—they
built a moral order, a utopia that is, that is grounded in affects, sentiments, and bodily
transformation. Qigong should not be reduced to a mere therapy that is narrowly
concerned with personal factors responsible for illnesses. The individual human body
inscribed in socio-political violence and reacting against injustice done to it through
therapeutic means is a metaphor for the body politic at large.

However, Qigong and Falun Gong are hampered by its prenatal limitations – at certain
points, it seemed to suggest that “the body could only do so much.” In contrast to
movements proactively seeking to forage into the public sphere, Qigong and Falun Gong
groups for a significant period of time were far from full-fledged, self-conscious
movements. Restricted by historical contingencies, the self-healing communities chose
instead to make a sanctuary in the private and interpersonal. Granted, operating in the
life-world carries with it civic significance in healing the afflicted body-self, but it limits
the vision and efficacy of Qigong/Falun Gong activism. As a result, dissatisfactions over
the system were not discursively articulated and addressed but internalized and obliquely
performed through illness conditions. Half self-expressing and half self-suppressing,
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social grievances expressed through bodily actions are displaced as soon they are named.
While it is true that embodied naming (through illness conditions) represents an
ingenious avenue of voicing discontent, the enabler could at the same time be a
constrainer, hindering the direct recognition of structural deficiency. As the body’s
inarticulate agency obscures the face of the real adversary, a short circuit is formed where
social conditions are only alluded to without being openly confronted, and solutions also
offered privately. In political terms, by not demanding institutional changes, what starts
as socio-political oppression remains personal, and Qigong practitioners inadvertently
perpetuate the injustice done to them in the first place.

It is the task of rhetorical analysis to uncover the rhetorical implication of what seems
to be non-rhetorical discourses and elucidate to what extent and under what condition
movement like Qigong and Falun Gong could evolve into full-fledged oppositional force.
Embodied practices, by virtue of being performance-oriented and mundane, are what
scholars of social action perceive to be of semi-automatic and semi-discursive quality;
they are “naturalized” behaviors undergirded by cultural factors. Social actors engaged
in such behaviors are not in the habit of scrutinizing their own actions because “unspoken
rules and tacit presumptions” are not yet “put up for discussion.”
642
Controversy only
breaks out when stabilized norms are no longer transparent and becomes objects of
contention. Before “the smooth veneer of doxa”

ruptures and escalates into open
confrontation,
643
critics should pay attention to and discern tensions in the making and
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the particular mode of communication addressing that situation. In this regard, the
traditional rhetorical studies founded on the notion of “rationality” and “consciousness”
seems insufficient to explore the unspoken, taken-for-granted knowledge buried in the
body which is pre-discursive and yet to develop into self-conscious critical thoughts. To
better address the complexities of human behaviors and the characteristics of
contemporary meaning-making movements, rhetorical critics can cultivate a sense of
“traversing” – shifting between the micro and the macro, the lifeworld and the public
sphere, in order to mine and reveal the critical edge contained in habituated orientations.
Doing so offers practical significance too as critical endeavor not only helps illuminate
the link between the lifeworld and the structure, under what conditions a “transcendence”
might occur, but assists with mobilizing the un-reflexive and unaware to realize
otherwise, to expose and confront structural violence which to this point has been lived
and felt without explicit recognition.

The mention of embodied healing activity as counter-hegemonic strategy also signals a
passive resisting ethos, i.e. one that avoids confrontation. Indeed, whether because of the
limitation attendant on embodied actions or the pain and inconvenience brought about in
shifting allegiance, Falun Gong had stayed “loyal” to the central government as the
rightful ruler, the “parent” and the “king,” until feeling reconciliation was out of the
question. Looking back, in view of the tremendous cost exacted in oppressing a large
group of people and in the same people resisting the said oppression, it is a pity that the
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regime was so entrenched in its old patterns. With a bit more good will and kind
considerations, with a bit more “dynamic understanding” of what a healthy social
equilibrium should assume, we would not be left with a deadlocked conflict going
nowhere. Again rhetorical analysis has proven its utility in helping to uncover even a
transient moment that promises dialogue and peaceful resolution. In cases of extreme
polarization, or despite extreme cases of polarization, it should remain at least a goal for
rhetorical studies to search and illuminate the existence of identification and
co-substantiality which, at least theoretically, point to common grounds for the parties in
dispute.

Falun Gong in Development: Going Apocalyptic in Tragic-Comic Form

This investigation has limited its scope to the early period of the Falun Gong
movement when its posture was still that of a loyal reformer. It did not take into account
of the movement’s later development. The onset of the state-led crackdown, instead of
wiping out Falun Gong, thoroughly alienated the movement and catapulted it into one of
China’s biggest challenges since Tiananmen. Yet different from Tiananmen’s
one-dimensionality, the Falun Gong movement has taken on a duo personality to
characterize its rhetorical pattern: To the external audience, through its own media outlets
and other public platforms, Falun Gong offers a forum uniting China’s political dissidents
in exile, its image having more to do with human rights causes and political actions more
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than anything else.
644
To the internal audience (devotees), however, there is an
intensification of apocalyptic themes, where Falun Gong practitioners are motivated by a
vision of moral and physical renewal at on cosmic level, and that the state-led repression
is nothing but a showdown – an impending sign actually-- between good and evil leading
up to the final resolution.

As discussed in previous chapters, in the Falun Gong teachings is buried a veiled
apocalyptic streak which is worded in terms of decline and rejuvenation – a metaphor
subsumed under the construct of “health,” yet a vision of spiritual and physical health
expandable to a global scale. This theory suggests that the cosmos and mankind, like an
organism, need to undergo periodical birth, stasis, degeneration, cleansing, and rebirth,
which has been a cyclical process throughout history.
645
This implicit strand of thought
embedded in the Falun Gong mythos was activated and intensified with the advent of
state-led repression. As the Party-state stepped up the crackdown, Falun Gong
practitioners have made a natural shift to interpret contemporary events through the
symbols of cosmic decline, clashes and regeneration. Evil no longer stays as an abstract
philosophical notion of negativity but has found its clear embodiment in the unholy
secular powers. Dark times such as the one the movement is experiencing have been
re-interpreted to be the necessary cost for the final payoff. The ruling Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) is recast as the earthly agent of cosmic demons on course for
eventual self-destruction.
646
To narrate the apocalyptic scene, Falun Gong rhetors have
315
made an interesting turn to reference the Christian vision. They suggest that the Book of
Revelation is equally valid in depicting the general scenario. The whore, the decadent
city of Babylon, and the scarlet-colored beast (recall CCP’s fondness for red) worshiped
as the false idol can be conveniently mapped onto the regime seated in Beijing.
647

Earthquakes, flood, miraculous archeological findings and meteor showers are but
heavenly omens that the moral fight is on, its pulses being quickened as “degenerate
things are being corrected,” and the “havoc” is soon to be over.
648

649

The psychological function of apocalyptic rhetoric is apparent. It exercises a symbolic
denunciation of social cruelty; it comforts believers that the appearance of evil is part of
the cosmic plan instead of random human injustice; it confirms that the good and virtuous
shall prevail in time, and the current hardship is but a short prelude to heaven on earth. A
sense of privilege as well as a sense of mission, aggravated by perceived urgency,
pervades the Falun Gong community. Followers are not only suggested to be the
“chosen” ones to be saved by the grace of heavens (which reward the faithful believers
who stick to the principle of “truth, kindness and tolerance” in face of persecution) but
those privy to “heaven’s truth,” and commissioned by the will of the universe to spread
the gospels to warn and save as many non-believers as possible -- by making these people
“aware” of the moral battle and choose wisely.
650
A discourse community is thus
constituted on the ground of apocalyptic prophecy and calls to perform missionary work.

316
I understand that in describing Falun Gong, the adoption of “apocalyptic” label itself is
controversial, very likely causing strong dislikes among Falun Gong practitioners – after
all, the nihilistic, violent “dooms day” scenario was something the Chinese state
attempted to pin onto Falun Gong in the propaganda war, a charge vehemently disputed
by the Falun Gong movement. The reason I am bringing up “apocalypse” is precisely for
the purpose of diffusing some of the misconceptions associated with the concept. I argue
that “apocalypse” can be viewed as a rhetorical construct to encompass a particular type
of conflict, namely, one addressing “the problem of evil as it appears within the context
of cosmic time.”
651
Based on this understanding, my main question is: How do the Falun
Gong rhetors conceptualize the constructs of “time” and “evil?” What dramatic “form”
does the apocalyptic rhetoric assume and how does this particular “form” inform
strategies and tactics of the movement?
652
To answer the question fully, it requires
another lengthy project which this chapter cannot accommodate. For now, I will briefly
suggest that Falun Gong offers a tragic-comic perspective. The tragic perspective
externalizes “evil” by separating self from the system and pursues the ritual of the “kill,”
whereas the comic view identifies self with those “trapped” and “victimized” by “evil,”
regarding them as still “savable” and might “have a future,” and adopts the ritual of
self-purification and persuasion.

Before I proceed to address the “form” of apocalypse, it is worth noticing that not all
apocalyptic philosophy embraces a “passive” tendency deterring activism. The common
317
view assumes that apocalyptic arguments indiscriminately foster public inaction and
lethargy where the audiences are “turn[ed] into passive spectators awaiting the fall of the
final curtain on history’s drama.”
653
But as Ruth Bloch states, apocalypse sparks various
reactions: It “has been interpreted as a spur to action, as a source of comport, and as a
rationale for passivity…Ideologically it has been judged inherently radical, ‘progressive,’
and ‘conservative’.”
654
Indeed, there were cases where radicalized individuals took
excessive means to expedite the final moment of revelation in order to hasten the process
of “passing onto the next realm,” and there were cases where, pinning evils onto others
such as the pagans and the heretics, hordes of crusaders ransacked the earth in the name
of doing God’s bidding. I will argue that Li Hongzhi’s moral and religious edifice does
not encourage passivity, and it exhibits, to a certain extent, a “comic” (charitable, open)
view of the conflict layered upon “tragic” (doomed, closed) predictions.

Movements, writes Carlson citing Leland Griffin, “are vast ritual dramas wherein a
disaffected group internalizes and transcends social inequalities through confrontation”
with the other (evil, enemy, the status quo, etc). From this perspective, apocalypse
provides one version of the drama by “offer ［ing ］a religious solution to the issue of
theodicy.”
655
The conception of the source of evil and the presumed dynamics between
“us” and “them” determine the adequate course of action to be taken and the “form” a
movement adopts. For instance, a tragic form projects “evil” onto a “scapegoat” and lays
blame at its feet; it results in a totalistic rejection of the other and “the cult of the kill.”
318
Conversely, a comic frame recognizes evil as arising from human errors which self and
the other equally partake of. Holding a charitable view, a movement embracing the comic
frame of acceptance endeavors to expose evil as fallacy and to alert the public to its
danger. The comic frame of acceptance is what Burke prefers as he sees in it “mankind’s
only hope” for peaceful coexistence. As Carson states, quoting Burke,

The comic frame enables “people to be observers of themselves, while acting.” It
aims at creating “maximum consciousness. One would ‘transcend’ himself by noting
his own foibles.”
656

In view of Carson’s arguments, the Falun Gong movement adopts a form unique to its
goal.

As stated before, Falun Gong as a health movement used to accept the social order as
was or only in need of minor repairs. The burden of change presumably lied with the
individual citizens who chose to negotiate socially-inflicted sufferings by channeling
them into personalized psycho-somatic conditions which were then treatable through
Qigong/Falun Gong therapies. Back then, Falun Gong practitioners’ modest hope was to
make the most of their already circumscribed positions without touching the
fundamentals of the system, nor did they want gentle prodding on their part incur any
new wrath from the big brother. Such “naivety” came to an abrupt end in the state-led
319
persecution which alerted people to the “reality” of the social order being one so stringent
as to be unable to make the anticipated accommodation. When the strictures of social
order became totally unacceptable to the change agent, a “positive” frame of attitude
toward the system disintegrated, to be replaced by a “negative” view, and this
“negativity” was recast in the double language of anti-authoritarianism and apocalypse.
As a “shift in the allegiance to the symbols of authority” occurred,
657
there emerged a
gap of identification with the old order. What was originally addressed as “leaders” of the
country was renamed “monstrous tyrants” who had lost their humanity and was now
“pawns of cosmic demons.” Accordingly, a tragic strain explicitly arose in Falun Gong
where evil was essentialized and unquestionably lodged in the Chinese communist
regime. Politically and morally, the system is considered irreparably corrupt, long past
the point of redemption. A temporal construct is raised by Falun Gong rhetors who claim
that the cosmic drama was “pre-arranged eons ago” and the battle between good and evil,
according to various omens and signs, has entered the last phase. The “truth” is about to
be revealed, and a massive reordering penetrating all levels of the universe is bound to
occur willy-nilly, as the final chapter of cosmic history is quietly wrapping up.
658
Using
a frame of rejection conceived in apocalyptic terms, the tragic view has repositioned the
movement to be in a stance of moral irreconcilability with the “enemy,” which, to borrow
from Duncan, should be “prepared” “for sacrifice,” not to be engaged in a “dialogue.”
659

320
For a health movement aimed at “the betterment of self” instead of “debunking” the
system, “evil” never entered its conceptual map. The intensification of the persecution
radicalized the movement whose attitudinal frame of reference has seized on “evil” and
“victimage” as the only viable solution. Yet upon closer examination, the absolutist
verdict is qualified by comic elements concerning the symbolic construction of evil and
time in Falun Gong’s apocalyptic imagination. True. The overall cosmic drama is already
set, yet its actual happening and procedure are subject to change, and “evil” does not
entirely assume its existence outside “our” arena. Li Hongzhi suggests that evil at times
exists not so much in person as in personification, its appearance tied to reasons
concerning “self and self-cultivation,” and its ability to survive and prosper depends on
“our” attitude and action. Consistent with the Buddhist creed that “phenomena are but
indexes of the heart” (xiang you xin sheng),
660
evil is postulated to exist as much within
as without, assuming the form mirroring the desires we harbor, be it lust, fear, selfishness,
the temptation of worldly power, etc. To illustrate such a theory, “Chapter Six” of Zhuan
Falun tells about a young man’s attachment to commendation and pleasure and how such
foibles incurred the apparition of false deities to flatter him and demonic beauties to
seduce him – tests of the evils he must pass. Once he did, evil vanished, losing ground for
existence. Evil thus conceived can be viewed as the manipulator and purveyor of sensual
desires threatening to interfere with the feeble-minded, claiming an allegorical existence
rather than physical.
661
Li Hongzhi instructs his followers that the process to negate the
influence of the evils is an ongoing, daily battle encountered by all serious cultivators.
321
Those who are not “vigilant” invite “demonic thinking in” and amount to “aligning with
the opposing side” and “doing what the evil wants done.”
662
From this perspective,
individuals are no passive “spectators” to the cosmic drama but the very “targets” of evil
snare and the very agents of resistance. Humans cannot delegate their own fight to others,
“gods and deities” included. As Li Hongzhi asserts, “at the critical moment,” nobody can
be “represented by someone else,” nor “denied the opportunity of choosing his own
future.”
663
Gods do exist, but they are in assistant positions to the key players of the
drama -- humans. “Gods’ hands are tied if you have no righteous thoughts,” Li once
lamented.
664
The fate of the Falun Gong followers, the non-believing rank and file,
mankind, and the universe at large, rests upon human decisions and human choices.
665

Losing the battle, it is destruction upon us all. Thus illustrated, “future” according to the
Falun Gong perspective does not forebode a “closed” scenario as suggested by the tragic
frame of rejection, but one unfolding in accordance with human actions and behaviors,
the outcome of which contingent upon choices we make. In O’Leary’s classification of
the conception of cosmic time, Falun Gong’s apocalyptic projection exhibits a comic
tendency.
666

The adoption of comic frame of reference determines relevant tactics of repelling evil.
Again demonstrating comic characteristics, Falun Gong as a movement eschews any
recourse to “violence.” The war the movement has embarked on is less about slaying
external evils than for the purpose of mortification and self-purification (Ad Bellum
322
Purificandum), and therefore the preferred means is persuasion and exhortation. “Human
nature universally repels violence. Violence makes people ruthless and tyrannical,” as
one Falun Gong rhetor states.
667
Do not sink so low as to the level of the enemy, Li
repeatedly cautions, for terror and violence are but the favorite tools of the authoritarian
regime. To his followers, Li indicates that agency does not lie in toppling the evil system
per se – which is on course for self-destruction anyway, but in endurance, hard work, and
self-purification in spite of seemingly insurmountable hardship, and using the moral
character thus acquired to wake up others so nobody would “consort with the whore” and
“fall with the beast.” Sounding an ecumenical note and probably referencing the
Buddhist belief on reincarnation, Li embraces humanity at large: “Every person in the
entire world was at one point part of my family…You (Falun Gong disciples) don't know
how many relatives from the past you have in this world.”
668
Based on this presumed
co-substance, the comic mindset recognizes humanity in all beings, including those
working for the evil regime. All creatures are inherently moral, Li insists, and those
complicit in the system are only temporarily “trapped” and “deluded,” waiting to be
“waken up.” “Have faith in the Buddha Law,” Li exhorts his followers, and “use
compassion” and “righteous mind” to rekindle the innate “Buddha nature” of all beings,
regardless of what they do at present.
669
In short, the Falun Gong followers’ tasks
primarily consist in self-refinement, raising consciousness and saving people by
preventing them from perishing with the evils.
670
There is no bigger good than
“clarifying and propagating the truth” – a much used Falun Gong phrase, which seems to
323
suggest that the best strategy to usher in the period of “Revelation” is precisely through
disciples “revealing” the “truth” to as many as possible.

So to summarize, to the extent that communism as a system is unequivocally evil,
Falun Gong employs the “frame of rejection” which posits an absolute dualism between
us and them, and hence promotes an absolute irreconcilability between the movement and
the social order. But in terms of selecting the appropriate “symbolic ritual” to counter evil,
Falun Gong incorporates the “frame of acceptance” by admitting that humans are prone
to errors (fallibility) and correctable (perfectibility), that “evil is only bred by those with
ill thoughts,” and hence correspondingly opts for a strategy of self-purification,
non-violent resistance and persuasion. Temporally, the final episode of the cosmic drama
is pre-determined in evil’s eventual demise (an inevitable fate), yet the actual unfolding
and timing of the plots and subplots contingent upon human doings (embodied in the
concept of “fortune”). Without latching onto a fixed apocalyptic timeline but leaving it
variable with human agency, Li Hongzhi has successfully avoided the rhetorical burden
attendant on prophetic inaccuracy which has plagued many apocalyptic rhetors in history.
With the future conceived as an inevitable “fate” tempered by open-ended “fortune,” a
sense of optimism is inserted in what is usually fatalistic argument on apocalypse. The
sense of tragic-comic ambivalence is nicely captured by some Falun Gong rhetors who
aptly compare it to “a net that is tightening yet leaving an opening (for those wrong-doers
to have a way out).”
671

324
“Frames” in the broadest sense can be understood as interpretive schemata to
organize experiences and chart social actions. Frames help social actors recognize who
they are vis-à-vis the other, and what actions constitute good and meaningful actions. For
critics to assess the motive and effectiveness of a movement on its own terms, they must
understand the underlying reference frame. Bearing this in mind allows us to evaluate
what seems to be “unusual” action grammar. In the case of Falun Gong, its tragic-comic
apocalyptic frame encourages rhetorical actions severing the system from the rest: Let the
bankrupt regime fall to its doom, yet retain as many savable beings (including those
“hijacked” by the system) as possible. One case in point to illustrate this line of thinking
is the so-called “Tuidang” movement.

Tuidang, or “quitting the Communist Party” is a relatively recent outgrowth of Falun
Gong’s resistance to the status quo; it signals a stance of intransigence adopted by Falun
Gong in its later periods. Since 2005, Falun Gong websites and volunteers have been
urging the average Chinese citizens (the majority of whom are either Communist Youth
League members or Party members as such membership is implemented through the
public schooling system) to withdraw from the Party.
672
Despite its political appearance,
Tuidang is considered by Falun Gong to transcend politics by offering people an
opportunity to be aligned with a transcendent source capable of delivering salvation and
grace in the impending calamity. Accordingly, Tuidang is couched in an urgent
apocalyptic tone meant to appeal to the Falun Gong believers and non-believers alike for
325
whom “safety” is touted as the paramount concern. As one Tuidang message proclaims,
“The Chinese Communist Party is destined to be destroyed by heaven in the great
cataclysm approaching, but the lives of those who resign from the Communist Party will
be saved!”
673

Actually, the term “quitting” is a misnomer and practically impossible as the average
citizens aren't able to officially leave the Party. Withdrawal through institutional means
or even publically speaking out against CCP risks personal safety. In the Chinese context,
joining the Communist Party and its subsidiary organizations is like a one way trip, once
in, no way out. Those who detest the Party, those who detest being dragged into the Party,
literally have no means to resist its monolithic dominance, and Party membership is a
compromise everyone has to make. The promissory gesture – quitting the Party online or
posting a withdrawal notice on a public wall – amounts to a moral statement of severance
and renunciation, a quiet subversion of the heart. In the meantime, the gestural quitting is,
from the Falun Gong religious perspective, acknowledged by “gods (who) only look at
people’s hearts” and evaluate beings accordingly.
674
That is why alias usage in
withdrawal declarations is encouraged by Falun Gong rhetors who claim that “a person’s
alias has the same effect as his other names.”
675

For some commentators the significance and effectiveness of Tuidang – making
renunciation through aliases and online posts – is a matter of dispute. Some argue that it
326
exerts little institutional impact by using fake names. As Ethan Gutmann puts it, the
number of Party-quitters online -- now exceeding 100 million according to the Tuidang
website -- is “as shaky as any Internet survey.”
676
Others, however, contend that the
effect of Tuidang is very real. Doubly motivated by religious as well as political concerns,
Tuidang has both pragmatic and transcendental implications. Pragmatically, denouncing
the Party through personal withdrawal rallies the disaffected by constructing an
identifiable target and an executable line of action: There is a consummate pleasure in
performing a “symbolic killing” of the enemy, albeit the rite of killing is undertaken in
anonymity. Transcendentally, denouncing the Party and refusing to be complicit amounts
to a spiritual “cleansing,” a ritual of “self-purification” which Falun Gong asserts
guarantee those “who want a future” to be able to “enter the new epoch.”
677
Not unlike
John Paul II urging Poles to cleanse themselves of the compromises made with the
communist regime by identifying with God, Tuidang presents a spiritual ritual as the
avenue of unification and transcendence. Tuidang is a political statement stemming from
Falun Gong’s religious sentiment and apocalyptic prophecy. Toward the “evil communist
party,” it outlines a tragic frame of rejection, but toward the rank and file, a comic frame
of acceptance is evident in embracing universal humanity whereby humans, being
endowed with free agency and perfectible, are always allowed the opportunity to “erase
the beast’s marks on their bodies” should they choose to.
678

327
The underground “Party-quitting” movement, although still receiving scant scholarly
attention, is sweeping across China where people make withdrawal announcements
through ingenious means: faxes, the Internet, automatic phone services provided by Falun
Gong volunteers based in North America, and writing on banknotes to be further
circulated.
679
A Falun Gong-sponsored website tallies the “Party-quitter” number on a
daily basis.
680
As Caylan Ford observes, Tuidang is “not a political movement in the
conventional sense,” for it does not “embrace Western democracy” or propose a new
system in place of the old.
681
However, it serves to destabilize the morale of the Party,
“weakening the CCP…from within” in “an ideological war” “without gun smoke.”
682
It
is implied that the strategy is to beat the Party at its own game. “The evil Party drags
people in by forcing the populace to swear allegiance to it and implicates them in their
misdeeds. Where it hijacks people’s souls, we free them.”
683
For Falun Gong believers,
Tuidang is a conscience restoration movement informed by spiritual convictions and
apocalyptic prophecy. By aligning with a higher spiritual force (“heaven,” “cosmic laws,”
etc), people are purged of the guilt of living under the regime. For the disaffected at large,
Party-quitting offer a rare platform to “vent frustrations, discuss ideas, share stories of
suffering, or find forgiveness.”
684
It is a “shrewd” move enabling the Falun Gong
movement to go beyond its own circumscribed plight and persecution. A de facto alliance
is created among those bearing grudges against the Party as a common target. Thus
theorized, Tuidang is a dual-goaled movement influenced by apocalypse-inspired
religious vision as well as political discontent. In effect Falun Gong followers
328
propagating the action of “Party-quitting” help expose the system as a system, a human
creation one can withdraw from instead of a holy entity owning people’s souls. This
tactic emphasizes identification with those supposedly “duped” by the system in the spirit
of “approaching” and “demonstration” rather than “reproaching” and “remonstration”
(Potius Convincere Quam Conviciari).
685
A rough parallel can be spot between Tuidang
and Gandhi’s satyagraha which similarly rejected the colonial system as a system yet
held a chartable view on those implicated in the system by acknowledging their humanity
and appealing to their sympathy. Both causes are underpinned by religious sentiments;
both causes have demonstrated political significance.

For some students of apocalyptic rhetoric, the main concern is to study apocalyptic
rhetors’ stratagem of diffusing and dispelling the tension created in waiting for that which
has been predicted countless times yet has never arrived and probably never will. My
concern is with a different issue. What interests me is the socio-political implication of a
faith system resembling a civil religion pushing for changes in China in ways small and
big. All along, whether making political statements through health or through apocalypse,
Falun Gong, like other ground-up movements seeking to open a wedge in an ironclad
room, has demonstrated an obstinate drive for dignity, honor and decency. Human
conscience, civil liberty and social justice are universal values not to be negated for long
or replaceable by material abundance.
686
There are always those willing to buck an
ossified structure while sacrificing whatever little freedom they enjoy. Whether the
329
prophesized “calamity” will hit or not is a matter of theological debate; it is also a
phenomenon reflecting the deep-rooted existential perception of time and evil in the
context of a moral universe. But one thing is certain: Falun Gong has decidedly reshaped
the spiritual and political landscape of China. For the ordinary Chinese citizens struggling
to live a productive and spiritual life against all odds, Falun Gong has offered a valuable
lesson of resistance and resilience.

330

Notes

Chapter 1

1
Daniel Lynch, “Envisioning China’s Political Future: Elite Reponses to Democracy as a Global
Constitutive Norm.” International Studies Quarterly 51(2007): 701-722. Critics have noted that China
has successfully practiced a two-pronged model of economic liberalization and political stagnation.
This duality China has been known to embrace is ironically termed “socialism with Chinese
characteristics.” See for example Richard McGregor’s The Party: The Secret World of China's
Communist Rulers (London: Harper, 2010).
2
During her first trip to China in 2009 as a cabinet member Hillary Clinton explicitly stated that the
global economic crisis was a more pressing matter and human rights issues should take a backseat.
Richard Spencer, “Hillary Clinton: Chinese human rights secondary to economic survival,” the
Telegraph, Feb 4, 2009.
3
Prior to Falun Gong’s public breakout on April 25, 1999, Western media attention to the group can
best be described as scant. A Lexis-Nexis search on “Falun Gong” prior to 1999 yields only two
returns. This lack of interest was, of course, followed by an inundation of reports in the aftermath of
Falun Gong’s mass rally at Zhongnanhai, China’s central leadership compound, testifying to the
aphorism that “the media loves a fight.”
4
Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945); Leland
Griffin, "The Rhetoric of Historical Movements," Quarterly Journal of Speech 38 (1952): 184-188;
Robert Cathcart, "Movements: Confrontation as Rhetorical Form," Southern Speech Communication
Journal 43: 233-47.
5
Li Hongzhi, “Lun Yu,” in his Zhuan Falun, http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/lecture0.html.
6
Richard Madsen, China’s Catholics: Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000), 244.
7
Yuezhi Zhao “Falun Gong, Identity, and the Struggle over Meaning Inside and Outside China,” in
Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World, ed. Nick Couldry and James
Curran (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 209.
8
Falun Gong self-claims to have 100 million followers at its peak, which is a reasonable number
given that Qigong itself had 200 million in its prime, and that Falun Gong shared “membership,” or
interested enthusiasts, with other Qigong schools. According to Danny Schechter, the Chinese
government recorded Falun Gong at 70 million prior to the crackdown. To downplay Falun Gong’s
importance, the state’s propaganda organ later diminished the number to 20 million. For Qigong’s
estimated membership, see Nancy Chen, Breathing Space (New York: Columbia University Press,
2005). Danny Schechter, Falun Gong’s Challenge to China (New York: Akashic Books, 2000).
9
James Tong, Revenge of the Forbidden City, The Suppression of Falun Gong in China, 1999-2005
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
10
Ibid.
11
Please refer to Nicholas Kristof’s article “Tear Down this Cyberwall!” published in New York
Times on June 09, 2009 at the height of the Iran conflict.
12
Ethan Gutmann, Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire and Betrayal (San
Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004), 41.
13
Ethan Gutmann, “How the War Against Falun Gong Started,” the Epochtimes, April 24, 2009.
14
Michael Laris, “Spiritual Group Protests in 30 Cities Across China,” Washington Post, July 22,
1999. Labels and reporting frames were even mish-mashed within the same media outlet, reflecting
equivocation on the part of the press. For example, the Washington Post employed both “spiritual
group” and “sect” (and sometimes “cult”) to refer to Falun Gong. Associated Press used “sect” and
“meditation group” interchangeably in its 1999 reporting. Likewise, a Christian Science Monitor
article juxtaposes two perspectives in the same story: On the one hand, it compares Falun Gong to
331

“another Tiananmen” and validates its social movement status, but on the other, the very same article
also questions Falun Gong’s legitimacy by quoting one Western commentator as saying "I myself
cannot figure out whether Falun Gong is a religion entitled to protection under the Constitution, or a
cult, or a movement." Kevin Platt, “Another Tiannamen Ahead?” Christian Science Monitor, July 23,
1999.
15
Miro Cernetig, “China nabs doomsday believers as antigovernment protests grow,” the Globe and
Mail, July 21, 1999; Lorien Holland, “China cracks down as cult unrest grows,” The Independent, July
22, 1999.
16
William A. Davis, “Next in New Age: Falun Gong,” the Boston Globe, July 14, 1999.
17
Ken Roth, quoted in Danny Schecter’s Falun Gong’s Challenge to China, Spiritual Practice or
“Evil Cult”? (New York: Akashic Books, 2000), 70.
18
Schechter, Falun Gong’s Challenge, 69.
19
“Neo-religion” is the sociologically neutral counterpart of “cult.”
20
Li Honghzi, “Jinan Jiangfa” (Jinan Lectures) (speech given in Jinan, China, June 21-28, 1994)
http://www.falundafa.org/media/indexbig5.html).
21
Jiang Zemin, “Speech” (speech given to fellow Politburo members, Beijing, June 7, 1999), its
Chinese version available online at http://beijingspring.com/bj2/2001/60/2003727210907.htm.
22
Alex Lo, “Politics off limits, says Falun Gong,” South China Morning Post , May 8, 1999.
23
Zenon Dolnyckyj in discussion with the author, January 2008.
24
Clifford Geertz provides the classical “consciousness” definition for religion in which he treats
religion as essentially “a system of symbols which acts … to establish powerful, pervasive, and
long-lasting moods and motivations in men by … formulating conceptions of a general order of
existence…” Geertz, “Religion as a cultural system,” The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays
by Clifford Geertz (Fontana Press, 1993), 87-125.
25
Hugh Duncan, Communication and Social Order (New York: The Bedminster Press), 114-115.
26
Michele Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge (Vintage, 1982), 137.
27
Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkley: University of California Press, 1969), 43.
28
Evelyn Micollier, “Qigong Group and Civil Society in P.R. China,” International Institute for
Asian Studies Newsletter, no. 22 (June 2000): 32.
29
Stephen O’Leary, “Falun Gong and the Internet,” Online Journalism Review, June 15, 2000,
available at http://www.ojr.org/ojr/ethics/1017964337.php.
30
Noah Porter, Falun Gong in the United States: An Ethnographic Study (master thesis, University of
Southern Florida, 2003).
31
Benoit Vermander, “Looking at China through the Mirror of Falun Gong,” China Perspectives 35
(May ‑June 2001): 4-35.
32
David Ownby, Falun Gong and the Future of China (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ Press,
2009).
33
Anne Cheung, “In Search of A Theory of Cult And Freedom of Religion in China: The Case of
Falun Gong,” Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal 13, no.1 (2004): 2.
34
Singer’s views are figured prominently on the Chinese government-run propaganda sites. See for
instance “Margaret Thaler Singer, former president of APS views on Falun Gong,” available at
http://www.facts.org.cn/views/200708/t58874.htm.
35
Michael Greenlee, “A King Who Devours His People: Jiang Zemin and the Crackdown on Falun
Gong, a Bibliography,” International Journal of Legal Information 34, no.3 (2006): 561-562,
available at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/ijli/vol34/iss3/9.
36
Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, And The Human Condition (Basic
Books, 1989).
37
Nancy Chen, Breathing Space; Susan Palmer and David Ownby, “Field Notes: Falun Dafa
Practitioners: A Preliminary Research Resport,” Nova Religio 4 (2000), 133-137.
38
Nancy Chen, Breathing Space; Nancy Chen, “Healing Sects and Anti-Cult Campaigns” The China
Quarterly 174 (2003): 505-520.
39
Thomas Ots, “The silenced body - the expressive Leib: on the dialectic of mind and life in Chinese
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cathartic healing,” in Embodiment and experience: the existential ground of culture and self, ed.
Thomas J. Csordas (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), 117-136.
40
Vermander, “Looking at China through the Mirror of Falun Gong.”
41
Leland Griffin, “A Dramatistic Theory of the Rhetoric of Movement.”
42
James Tong, the Revenge of the Forbidden City (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009);
Elizabeth Perry, “Challenging the mandate of heaven: Popular protest in modern China” Critical
Asian Studies 33, no 2 (2001): 163-180.
43
R.J. Munro, “Political psychiatry in post-Mao China and its origins in the Cultural Revolution”
American Academy of Psychiatry and Law30 no,.2 (2002): 97-106.
44
Patricia Thornton “Framing dissent in contemporary China: Irony, ambiguity and metonymy,”
China Quarterly 171 (2002): 661-681.
45
Leeshai Lemish, “Western Media Framing in Reporting Falun Gong,” (paper presented at the Asian
Communication Conference, Taipei, Taiwan, June 20-21, 2005).
46
Min Xiao, The Cultural Economy of Falun Gong in China: A Rhetorical Perspective (Columbia:
The University of Southern Carolina Press, 2011).
47
Ruth Block, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800 (Columbia
University Press, 1988), xi-xii.
48
David Palmer, Qigong Fever, Body, Science and Utopia in China (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2007).
49
Leland Griffin, “the rhetoric of historical movement.”
50
Maria Hsia Chang, Falun Gong, the End of Days (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
Stephen O’Leary’s book Arguing the Apocalypse” offers a good summary on apocalyptic discourse as
a genre. According to O’Leary, apocalypse is characterized by three rhetorical constructs, i.e. time,
evil and authority, as it deals with the resolution of “evil” in the context of “cosmic time.” Stephen
O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse, A theory of Millennial Rhetoric (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994).
51
Susan Palmer, “From Healing to Protest: Conversion Patterns Among the Practitioners of Falun
Gong,” Nova Religio 6, no 2 (2003): 348-364.
52
It is my view that “evil” and “demon” discussed in Buddhist scriptures and other oriental religious
tracts may not be the exact equivalents of their Western counterparts; they deserve more nuanced
readings. Sakyamuni speaks of mara, or demon, as representative of lust, ego, power, and worldly
duties conjured up to test the worthiness of the believers. Likewise, Li Hongzhi places “demons” in
the cultivator’s inner as well as the outer world. There is a sense that “demons” thus conceptualized
should first and foremost orient inwardly because its outer appearance/apparition is but the projection
of one’s inner state. Consequently, self-purification rather than killing/victimage is the preferred
means of combating “demons.”
53
See for instance “The Catastrophe” and “Cleansing Out,” penned by Falun Gong’s founder Li
Hongzhi in 2002, available at http://falundafa.org/book/eng/HongYinIIVA.htm#_Toc141367548.
54
Based on my interviews, there are a large number of Falun Gong followers, although aware of the
“final cleansing of the evil,” choosing to get on with their daily life just the same. To them,
apocalyptic vision is what they genuinely believe in but not an imperative they abandon their daily life
for.
55
Li Hongzhi, “Teaching the Fa in San Francisco, 2005” (speech presented at the San Francisco
Falun Dafa Meeting, San Francisco, California, November 5, 2005)..
56
Ibid.
57
Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 41.
58
Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature and Method (Berkley: University
of California Press, 1968), 193. Richard Johannesen, “Ultimate Terms,” in Encylcopedia of Rhetoric
and Composition: Communication from Ancient Times to the Information Age, ed. Theresa Enos (New
York and London: Routledge, 2010), 714.
59
Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 74.
60
Richard Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric, 222-223.
333

61
Michael Leff, “Topical Invention and Metaphoric Interaction,” The Southern Speech
Communication Journal 48, no.3 (1983): 215.
62
Stephen O’Leary, “A Dramatisitc Theory of Apocalyptic Rhetoric.” Quarterly Journal of Speech,
79 (1993):385-426.
63
Richard Weaver, Language is sermonic: Richard M. Weaver on the nature of rhetoric (Baton
Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 208.
64
Ibid.
65
O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse, 24.
66
Burke describes “form” as the “psychology of the audience,” and the “arousing and fulfillment of
desires.” Burke, Counterstatement, 153.
67
Bernard Brock, "Rhetorical Criticism: A Burkeian Approach Revisited” In Methods of Rhetorical
Criticism: A Twentieth-Century Perspective, ed. Bernad Brock and Robert Lee Scott (Detroit: Wayne
State U Press, 1990), 187.
68
Sonja Foss, “Women Priests in the Episcopal Church: A Cluster Analysis of Opposition Rhetoric,”
Religious Communication Today 7 (September 1984): 1-11.
69
Brock, “Rhetorical Criticism,” 187.
70
Leland Griffin,“A Dramatistic Theory of the Rhetoric of Movements.” In Critical Responses to
Kenneth Burke 1924-1962, ed William M. Rueckert (Minneapolis: U Minnesota Press, 1969); Leland
Griffin, “The Rhetoric of Historical Movements.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 38 (April 1952):
184-88.
71
Robert Cathcart, “New Approach to the Studies of Movement: Defining Movement Rhetorically,”
Western Speech 36, no. 2 (1972): 82-88.
72
Robert Cathcart, "Movement: Confrontation as rhetorical form” in Methods of rhetorical criticism:
a twentieth-century perspective, eds Bernard Brock and Robert Lee Scott (Detroit: Wayne State U
Press, 1990), 361-370.
73
AC Carlson, “Gandhi and the Comic Frame, ‘Ad Bella Purificandum,’” Quarterly Journal of
Speech 72 (1986):446-455.
74
Robert Cathcart, “New Approach”: 86.
75
O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse, 24.
76
Hugh Duncan, Communication and Social Order, 110.
77
Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), 256.
78
Hugh Duncan, Communication and Social Order (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction, 1968),
109-140.
79
Benjamin Penny, The Religion of Falun Gong (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 2012).
80
Jay Stevenson, the Complete Idiot Guide to Eastern Philosophy (Indianapolis, IN: Alpha, 2000),
230.

Chapter 2

81
Perry Link, Evening Chats in Beijing (New York and London: Norton, 1992),173-191.
82
Michael Schoenhals, Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics: Five Studies (Berkeley:
Institute of
East Asian Studies, University of California, 1992).
83
Ibid.
84
Liao Yiwu, The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up (Anchor, 2009), 220.
85
Victor Shaw: Social Control in China: A study of Chinese Work Units (Praeger, 1996), 48.
86
To give a quick example of the topsy-turvy quality of Chinese politics: the political status of
“capitalists” in China has experienced a sea change. Once the condemned “exploiters” of and
“parasites” on the working-class, they are now the “precious assets” for “socialism with Chinese
characteristics.” Geremie R. Barmé in “History of the Masses” comments on the waywardness of
China’s political wind: “Every policy shift in recent Chinese history has involved the rehabilitation,
re-evaluation and revision of history and historical figures.” Such revisions are no minor corrections
334

but often involve complete overhauls to “turn the inverted history on its head.” Although Barme stops
short of addressing the root cause for such waywardness, I think the inconsistency is partly due to the
fact that China’s contemporary policy decisions have been made not with an established political
theory in mind but out of pragmatics and expediency – aptly summarized in Deng Xiaoping’s famous
saying, “crossing the river by feeling for stones.” See Geremie Barme, “History of the Masses,” in
Using the Past to Serve the Present, ed. Jonathan Unger (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1993), available at
http://www.tsquare.tv/themes/Histmasses.html.
87
Perry Link, Evening Chat in Beijing, 178.
88
Richard Weaver, “Two Types of American Individualism, the Separate Ways of John Randolph
and Henry David Thoreau,” Modern Age (1963): 119-35.
89
Geremie Barme, In the Red (Columbia University Press: 2000).
90
On the topic of “authoritarian capitalism,” see for instance “Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda
and Thought Work in Contemporary China” by Ann-Marie Brady (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield,
2007) and The Beijing Consensus: How China's Authoritarian Model Will Dominate the Twenty-First
Century, by Stefan Halper (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
91
Richard McGregor argues that the “Party’s genius has been its leaders’ ability in the last three
decades to maintain the political institutions and authoritarian powers of old-style communism,” while
encouraging a fairly high degree of economic liberalization and “hitching the power and legitimacy of
a communist state to the drive and productivity of an increasingly entrepreneurial economy.” In the
words of China researcher Yanzhong Huang, the “marriage between “power and wealth in China’s
officialdom” has rendered the state the “executive committee” of the ruling rich. McGregor, the Party,
The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers (Haper Collins: 2010), 36; 1-70. Yanzhong Huang,
“Wikileaks, Zhongnanhai-ology, and the Prospect for Political Reform in China,” Dec 8, 2010,
available at
http://blogs.cfr.org/asia/2010/12/08/wikileaks-zhongnanhai-ology-and-the-prospect-for-political-refor
m-in-china/.
92
About the formidable cost of protest in China, see for instance “China Jail Grandma for Organizing
Protest,” AFP, Nov 3, 2011.
93
McGregor, The Party: 17.
94
A parallel in the West would be “white” as a race marker is universal and hence unmarked; only
the “colored” are marked.
95
For instance, check out the most important Party newspaper People’s Daily or any state-run
newspaper in China, their online versions never have a session on “politics,” even though the majority
of the stories covered under the “China” tab are about activities related to the state. It seems to suggest
that government-based politics is so taken-for-granted and ingrained a fact of life that it never bothers
to be categorized as “political.”
96
A former Tiananmen activist and present critic of the Chinese government describes himself as a
“maverick.” His Chinese relatives and friends “criticize” him for “bringing up politics” because,
according to them, “China is much better now than before. Our daily lives are much better than they
once were.” He said that people “have moved on. They talk about buying a house, buying a car, going
abroad on vacation, putting their kids in this or that school. No one discusses politics." The
explanation for political apathy, as he explains, is that it is not so much “they're afraid” as “they're not
interested.” See Mara Hvistendahl, “The Great Forgetting: 20 Years After Tiananmen Square,” The
Chronicle of Higher Education, 19 May, 2009, available at
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Great-Forgetting-20-Ye/44267.
97
Borrowing the term from Samuel Huntington, Lynch argues that China’s public sphere is
characterized by a form of “praetorianism.” That is to say, “neither the state nor any other organized
political force can impose order on the mass media, and the construction of culture becomes
excessively market oriented without being directed toward the achievement of public political goals.”
The praetorian public sphere can be said to be a revision of the argument that the erosion of the state’s
ability to engage in propagandist thought work would automatically lead to a civil society in which
thoughtful political messages can be created and exchanged freely in an institutionalized manner.
335

Rather, the praetorian public sphere portrays an unstructured gray zone. Daniel Lynch, After the
propaganda state: Media, politics, and" thought work" in reformed China (Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 1999), 1-19.
98
Perry Link, Evening Chats in Beijing; Weiming Tu, “Intellectuals in a World Made of Knowledge,”
The Canadian Journal of Sociology 30 no.2 (2005): 219-226.
99
Tu Weiming, Way, learning, and politics: essays on the Confucian intellectual (Albany: State
University of New York, 1993).
100
Lynch, After the Propaganda State, 4-15. See also a CNN article titled “China's youth
post-Tiananmen: apathy a fact or front?” posted on June 3, 2009, on the eve of the 20
th
anniversary of
the Tiananmen Movement,
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-06-03/world/china.post.tiananmen.generation_1_tiananmen-uprising-post
-tiananmen-beijing-s-tiananmen-square?_s=PM:WORLD.
101
Gramsci, quoted in Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s Gramscie and the State, trans. David Fernbach
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980), 46.
102
Qiushi is an elite CCP Party journal. The original editorial warns against possible conspiratorial
moves on the part of the West: “When ideology is mentioned, some people always fix their eyes on
the core, naively thinking that nothing serious will come of it so long as the core is not touched
upon...In this regard, certain Western political bigwigs are much wiser than some of our comrades.
They said: as long as the youth of the country to be overturned have learned our language and dances
and have a weakness for our movies and television programs, they will, sooner or later, accept our
concepts of value. Unfortunately, this remark has been proved by what happened in the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe.” Liu Renwei, "On colonial culture," Qiushi (March 1996): 26-33, trans. FBIS
Daily Report (China), 4 September, 1996.
103
Tu Weiming. Interview. A World of Ideas with Bill Moyers: Tu Wei-ming, A Confucian Life in
America, 1990, available at http//.www.youtube.com/watch?v=afkQLslWtkI&feature=related.
104
Perry Link in his Evening Chat in Beijing explores “feigned compliance” - which he calls the
“gymnastics of political language” - as a coping method for the Chinese cadres and commoners alike
in reaction to the language game of pretense pervading the Chinese political sphere. Apparently,
double-talk indicates a corrupt state of insincerity and fear for open confrontation which in turn abets
the state’s authoritarian control. If probed further, however, feigned compliance can shield what James
Scott calls “pockets of dissent” as exemplified in pungent self-derogatory satire poking fun at feigning
by feigning the feigning. See Link, Evening Chats, 1992, and James Scott, Domination and the Arts of
Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (Yale University Press, 1992)
105
Lucian Pye, The Spirit of Chinese Politics
106
Fenggang Yang, Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011), kindle edition.
107
Yoshiko Ashiwa and David Wank, Making Religion, Making the State: The Politics of Religion in
Modern China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
108
Richard Johannesen, “Ultimate Terms,” Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition:
communication from ancient times to the Information Age, edited by Theresa Enos (Routledge:1996),
734.
109
Danny Wynn Ye Kwok, Scientism In Chinese Thought 1900-1950 (New Haven: Yale University
Press: 1965), 130.
110
Brett Sheehan, Industrial Eden, upcoming.
111
Ibid.
112
Ex Gu, “Cultural Intellectuals and the Politics of Cultural Public Space in Communist China
(1979-1989): a case study of three intellectual groups.” The Journal of Asian Studies 58, no.2:
389-431.
113
Lucian Pye, The Spirit of Chinese Politics.
114
Michael Schoenhals, Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics: 19.
115
Ibid. 22.
116
Ibid, 20; my italics.
336

117
Dan Lynch, “Envisioning China’s Political Future: Elite Reponses to Democracy as a Global
Constitutive Norm.” International Studies Quarterly 51(2007):701-722.
118
Richard Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (Davis, California: Hermagoras Press, 1953), 211-32.
119
CCP leaders are in the habit of adding to the Marxist theoretical repertoire their own ideational
inventions. Jiang Zemin coined the “Three Represents” in 2002 to embody China’s recent societal
change, arguing that “capitalists” should be allowed to join the Party. Following Jiang, Hu Jintao
conceived of “scientific development perspective” which has subsequently been incorporated into the
Party canons. Doing so allows CCP leaders to leave an indelible mark in history as leaders as well as
theorists. Their factional strife is also reflected in the clamoring for ideological upper-hand of their
respective theories.
120
Michael Schoenhals, Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics, 20.
121
Teng and Fairbank, China’s Response to the West: A Documentary Survey 1839-1923,
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 50.
122
A.P. Kipnis, “The Flourishing of Religion in Post ‐Mao China and the Anthropological Category
of Religion”; Ian Johnson, Wild Grass; C. H. Chen, “Framing Falun Gong: Xinhua news agency's
coverage of the new religious movement in China;” David Ownby, Falun Gong and the Future of
China
123
the Revised “Constitution of the People’s Republic of China,” available online at
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/constitution/constitution.html.
124
Fenggang Yang, Religion in China.
125
Ibid.
126
See Ownby’s congressional testimony on May 23, 2005 titled “Unofficial Religions in China:
Beyond the Party's Rules,” http://www.cecc.gov/pages/roundtables/052305/Ownby.php
127
The use of the term “superstition” implies an assumed superiority of those who use the term for
their own scientific, philosophical, or religious conviction. Superstition is a relative and subjective
term, which is aptly summarized in “one person’s’ religion is another one’s superstition.” Underlying
the employment of “superstitious” is the will for distinction and superiority.
128
Feuchtwang, “The Problem of ‘Superstition’ in PRC”
129
Mary O’Neil, “Superstition,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Eliade (New York: Macmillan,
1987), 165.
130
Rebecca Nedostup examines the “anti-superstition campaigns” launched by the Chinese
Nationalist Party in the 1920s and 1930s. See her “Civic Path and Hybrid Ritual In Nationalist China,”
in Converting Cultures, Religion, ideology and Transformations of Modernity, Washburn and
Reinhart, eds (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 20007): 27-56. Lawrence Babb examines religious change in
South Asia in her “New Media and Religious Change,” in Items 4: 72-76. Laurel Kendall looks at the
Korean situation in her “The Cultural Politics of ‘Superstition’ in the Korean Shaman World:
Modernity Constructs its Other,” in Healing Powers and Modernity: Traditional Medicine,
Shamanism, and Science in Asian Societies, Linda Connor, ed. (Westport: Greenwoood Press, 2001):
25-37
131
“Civic Faith and Hybrid Ritual in Nationalist China,” by Rebecca Nedostup, in Converting
Cultures, Religion, Ideology and Transformations of Modernity, Washburn and Reinhart, eds
(Leinden and Boston: Brill, 2007): 27-57. Robert Wellner wrote that “China’s government has a
century-long modernisit prejudice against local religion,” dating the origin of the prejudice to around
1911, when the Republican government took over power from the last imperial dynasty. See Wellner
“Unofficial Religions in China: Beyond the Party’s Rules,” May 23, 2005, available at
http://www.cecc.gov/pages/roundtables/052305/Weller.php;
132
Michele De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley: Univ of California Press, 1984),
178
133
McGee, “The ‘ideograph’: A link between rhetoric and ideology” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66
(1980): 1-16.
134
See Feuchtwang, Popular Religion in China, the Imperial Metaphor (London: Routledge, 1992).
Barend Ter Haar makes a similar argument by saying that the “millenarian cult ‘White Lotus ‘ was
337

little more than a label employed by the Chinese state to inculpate groups whose activities they found
suspect and to justify their suppression; (as such the white lotus was not ) an organized, coherent,
self-conscious tradition. In other words, ‘White Lotus’ has much the same status and utility as the
term ‘cult’ in contemporary American journalistic and popular usage.” See his "De Witte Lotus en de
Triaden: Criminaliteit in het oude China", China Nu 26: (2001).
135
On the subject of “science” being pitted against “superstition” in a highly politicized Chinese
context, please refer to Andrew B. Kipnis’s “The Flourishing of Religion in Post-Mao China and the
Anthropological Category of Religion”, in The Australian Journal of Anthropology 12 no.1: 32-46,
Scott Lowe’s “China and New Religious Movements,” in Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative
and Emergent Religions 4 No. 2: 213-224, David Ownby’s Falun Gong and the Future of China,
45-79, and Jian Xu’s “Body, discourse, and the cultural politics of contemporary Chinese qigong” in
The Journal of Asian Studies58, no. 4: 961-991 What distinguishes the Chinese discourse on
“superstition” vs “science” is that the Chinese state never assumes a neutral stance in what could have
been merely societal debate; on the contrary, it has had a record of intervening in the debate and
incriminated “superstitious” thoughts and behaviors.
136
Guangming Daily, 19 March 1983, p.2
137
To further illustrate the fluidity of “superstition,” Qingming Festival, along with paper burning for
the deceased, has been recuperated as “local customs.”
138
The exact charge, in such cases, would be “us[ing] heretical cult organizations to disrupt the
implementation of laws.” The Supreme People’s Court, “China's Law on Heretical Cults, 1999,” Oct 8,
1999, http://china.usc.edu/ShowArticle.aspx?articleID=1049
139
Hannah Beach, “Not-so-good Book,” Jan 21, 2002, Time, available at
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,193633,00.html
140
Fujian Ribao, 13 Jan 1982 (BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, Part 3: Far East. 6935, 23
January 1982), quoted in Stephan Feuchtwang (1989) "The Problem of 'Superstition' in the People's
Republic of China,"
141
The distinction between the sacred and the profane is usually traced to Durkheim. Emile Durkheim,
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1915)
142
Willard Oxtaby, ed., World Religions, 488. Julia Ching has offered a great example of the
non-exclusive aspect of Far Eastern religions. She writes, “If you ask a Japanese, for instance, whether
he or she is a believer in a particular religion, you may get the answer ‘no.’...However, if you ask
whether he or she adheres to Shinto, Buddhism, and Confucianism, you may get the answer ‘yes’.
Many Japanese follow more than one religion, even though they do not consider themselves very
religious.” Julia Ching, “East Asian Religions,” in World Religions,” Willard Oxtaby ed, 348
143
Clifford Geertz, Religion as a cultural system. Anthropological approaches to the study of religion.
(London: Tavistock, 1985): XLIII, 176
144
Talal Asad, Genealogy of Religion, and his “Anthropological Conception of Religion: Reflection
on Geertz”
145
There have been multiple attempts at classification and reification with regard to the Chinese
traditions, both by visiting Westerners and Chinese leadership. Religious scholar Willard Oxtoby
writes that “when the Christian world of the West viewed the other traditions, it sought to define them
in terms parallel to the way it understood Christianity.” Oxtoby’s argument is empirically confirmed
by Wilfred Smith who documents the shifts in Westerner’s designations of non-Western traditions: the
medieval times spoke of the “sect of” and the “heresy of” a people; later, one finds such phrases as
“Chinese wisdom” and “the philosophy of the Hindus;” then, “religion” started to appear, "Boudhism"
in 1801, "Hinduism" in 1829, "Taouism" in 1839, and "Confucianism" in 1862, marking the earliest
usage whereby these traditions are reified into distinct beings by Westerners encountering them. See
Willard Oxtoby, World Religions: Eastern Traditions (Toronto: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996); Wilfred
Smith, the Meaning and the End of Religion (Fortress Press, 1991). A notable example of how eastern
traditions might baffle the definitional effort is from the 18
th
century Jesuits’ dispute over the nature of
Confucianism – whether it is a civil rite or a religious one.
146
C. K. Yang first coined the term “diffused religion” to describe religious beliefs and practices
338

unfolding in family and community contexts rather than within an institutional religion framework.
Yang, Religion in Chinese Society: A Study of Contemporary Social Functions of Religion and Some
of Their Historical Factors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961).
147
Scott Lowe, in “China and New Religious Movements,” describes Confucianism as a civil religion:
“Government officials at all levels, from the imperial court down to the county magistrates, regularly
functioned in multiple capacities, serving in turn as investigators, public works managers, arbitrators,
judges, and religious specialists. Traditional rituals, and to a lesser extent the beliefs that accompanied
them, were an essential part of the governance process and a fundamental source of social harmony
and cohesion.”
148
Colin Ronan, The Shorter Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press,
1995)
149
On a side note, the fact that medicine was associated with most of these semi-religious traditions is
an instance of their composite nature. As Paul Unschuld, a leading scholar of the history of Chinese
medicine, asserts, “ ［T]he Chinese physician as a definable entity did not exist ［in imperial times ］…
［patients consulted ］shamans, Buddhist priests, Daoists hermits, Confucian scholars, itinerant
physicians, established physicians, laymen with medical knowledge, midwives, and many others.”
Paul Unschuld, Medicine in China: a history of pharmaceutics (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1979), 118
150
Talal Asad, “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category,” in A Reader in the
Anthropology of Religion, M. Lambeck, ed. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), 116.
151
George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (University of Chicago
Press, 2001).
152
Note that family metaphor shares similarities with organism metaphor in describing religious or
political organizations (“The church is the body of Christ, of which He is the head”) as unities of
connectedness and concerted growth.
153
For essays exploring family as a political metaphor , see Sara Hayden, “Family Metaphors and the
Nation: Promoting a Politics of Care through the Million Mom March” Quarterly Journal of Speech
89, no.3 (2003): 196-215, and Mary Lowenthal Felstiner, “Family Metaphors: the Language of an
Independence Revolution,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 25, no. 1 (1983):154-180.
154
J. Vernon Jensen, “British Voices on the Eve of the American Revolution: Trapped by the Family
Metaphor” Quarterly Journal of Speech 63 no. 1 (1977): 43-50.
155
Tonn et al, by making reference to Burke’s pentad, argue that emphasizing inherited land and
communal tradition expresses a “scenic” perspective which has the potential to reduce agent’s action
to motion. Mari Tonn, Valerie Endress, and John Diamond, “Hunting and Heritage on Trial,” the
Quarterly Journal of Speech 79 no.2 (1993):165-181.
156
See On Justification by Boltanski and Thévenot for the exposition on “domestic polity.”
157
Tu Weiming, “Destructive Will and Ideological Holocaust,” in Social Suffering, Kleinman, Das,
and Lock, eds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 150.
158
C.K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 38-46.
159
In the Dream of the Red Chamber, the sole heir to the Jia clan has to quench his urge to “leave the
family” and join the Buddhist order until he has fulfilled his filial piety of restoring the clan to its
previous glory and fathering an heir.
160
For scholarly research contrasting spiritual groups conciliatory to mainstream values with those
holding a counter-cultural view, see Gini Graham Scott’s Cult and Countercult: A Study of Spiritual
Growth Group and a Witchcraft Order (Wesport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1980).
161
Tu Weiming, “Destructive Will and Ideological Holocaust.”
162
Ibid.
163
Ezra F. Vogel, “From Friendship to Comradeship: the change in personal relations in communist
China,” The China Quarterly 21(1965): 46-60.
164
Wouter Haanegraaf, New Age Religion and Western Culture, 44.
165
Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: elements of a sociological theory of religion (Social Science,
1967), 80-81.
339

166
Allan Young, “The Anthropologies of Illness and Sickness,” Annual Review of Anthropology 11
(1982): 257-285.
167
Ibid.
168
Arthur Kleinman, Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1980).
169
Yu-chih Chen “Chinese Values, Health and Nursing,” Journal of Advanced Nursing 36, no2:
270–273.
170
Craig Janes. “The health transition, global modernity and the crisis of traditional medicine: the
Tibetan case,” Social Science & Medicine 48 no.12: 1803-1820.
171
See for instance, Vincanne Adams et al, eds, Medicine Between Science and Religion:
Explorations on Tibetan Grounds (Burghahn Books: 2010); Linda Connor and Geoffrey Samuel, eds,
Healing Powers and Modernity: Traditional Medicine, Shamanism, and Science in Asian Societies
(Greenwood: 2001); Faith, Health, and Healing in African American Life , Stephanie Mitchem and
Emilie Townes ,eds (Connecticut and London: Praeger, 2008).
172
Michel Foucault, the History of Sexuality Vol 1, translated by Robert Hurley (New York, Vintage
Books: 1990), 146.
173
This motto was actually crafted by Sun Yatsen.
174
Susan Brownell’s Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People's
Republic of China (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1995).
175
Foucault, the History of Sexuality Vol.1, 140.
176
Foucault has noted that violence is perpetrated in the name of preserving life. He writes: "If
genocide is indeed the dream of modern power, this is not because of the recent return to the ancient
right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and
the large-scale phenomena of the population." The ways in which “life” and “health” are upheld as an
unshakable goal justifying violence is similar to the ways in which “family” is treated as a banner to
warrant draconian means. Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol I, 137.
177
Leland Griffin, “A Dramatistic Theory of the Rhetoric of Movements,” 461.
178
John Hannigan, “Social Movement Theory and the Sociology of Religion: Toward a New
Synthesis,” Sociology of Religion 52: 311-331.
179
Bryan Turner, “The Discourse of Diet,” in the Body Social Process and Cultural Theory, ed.
Featherstone et al (Sage: 1991), 157-170.
180
Susan B. Anthony said that in a New York World interview on February 2, 1896.
181
John Super ed, The Seventies in America (Ipswich, Massachusetts: Salem, 2005).
182
Other notable examples of using sports as catalyst for social change include Dennis Brutus’s
lobbying to have the apartheid South Africa excluded from the International Olympic movement for
30 years and, also in South Africa, Mandela’s embrace of an all-white rugby team as a forum of
national unison. Dave Zirin’s A People's History of Sports in the United States: 250 Years of Politics,
Protest, People, and Play (New York: New Press, 2008).
183
McDonald, Global Movements, 162.

Chapter 3

184
Palmer, Qigong Fever. Jian Xu also tackles Qigong’s definitional difficulty in the late 1970s and
early 1980s. But his focus is on debates within the Chinese science circle on whether Qigong should
best base its validity in claims of “science” or “mysticism.” The debate Jian Xu addresses was a pure
intellectual one, and in certain aspects not unlike the historical discussion of whether Christianity
should be legitimated on rational ground (as suggested by Thomas Aquinas) or as private faiths and
revelations (a view represented by William of Ockham). Jian Xu, “Body, Discourse, and the Cultural
Politics of Contemporary Chinese Qigong,” The Journal of Asian Studies 58, no.4: 961-991.
185
Francis Hong, “Modern Medicine in China: When Medicine Took an Alternative Path,” McGill
Journal of Medicine 8 (2004):79-84.
186
Zhang Dainian and Edmund Ryden, Key Concepts in Chinese Philosophy (New Haven: Yale
340

University Press, 2002), 45-63.
187
An online source devoted to Liu Guizhen is available at
http://www.neiyanggong.us/nei-yang-gong-history.html. Liu’s story has become the agreed-upon
point of departure for Qigong’s development in contemporary China. See for example David Palmer’s
Qigong Fever and Utiraruto Otehode’s "The Creation and Reemergence of Qigong in China," in
Making Religion, Making the state: the Politics of Religion in Modern China, ed. Ashiwa and Wan,
241-265 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 2009).
188
Ibid.
189
David Palmer, Qigong Fever, 1-56.
190
Xu Yinggao, “Preventive Health Care: Deep Breathing Therapy,” New China Medicine 2, quoted
in Utiraruto Otehode’s “The Creation and Reemergence of Qigong in China,” 26.
191
David Ownby, Falun Gong and the Future of China, 51.
192
Liu Guizhen , Qigong Lianfa Shijian (Qigong therapy practices) (Shijiazhuang: Hebei People
Publishing House, 1957), 48.
193
David Palmer, Qigong Fever.
194
Liu Guizhen, Qigong Lianfa Shijian (Qigong Therapy Practices), 21.
195
Otehode, “The Creation and Reemergence of Qigong in China.”
196
Chen Shou, “On Qigong,” Gongren Ribao (Worker’s Daily), August 30, 1995.
197
Linda Connor and Geoffrey Samuel, Healing Powers and Modernity, Traditional Medicine,
Shamanism and Science in Asian Society (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group,
2001).
198
Paul Unschuld, Medicine in China: A History of Ideas (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1988).
199
Li Hongzhi, “Lecture 1,” Zhuan Falun, http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/lecture1.html.
200
Otehode, “The Creation and Reemergence of Qigong in China.”
201
Ownby, Falun Gong and the Future of China, 58.
202
Ibid.
203
Palmer, Qigong Fever, 45-46.
204
Craig James Hazen, The Village Enlightenment in America Popular Religion and Science in the
Nineteenth Century (Urbana University of Illinois Press, 2000),7.
205
Quoted in Palmer, Qigong Fever, 90.
206
Ibid.
207
Gu Hansen, “Juexin Dakai Qigong Kexue Shenmi De Damen” [Firmly Resolved to Open the
Great Mysterious Gate of Qigong Science], quoted in Palmer’s Qigong Fervor, 87.
208
John Lee (Caltech Physicist) in discussion with the author, Jan 2009.
209
Li Jianxin and Zheng Qin: 1995: Qigong Da Lunzhan [Qigong Polemics in 1995], quoted in Jian
Xu’s “Body.”
210
Ibid.
211
For instance, see Yan Xin et al, “Structure and Property Changes in Certain Materials Influenced
by the External Qi of Qigong,” Material Research Innovations 2, no. 6: 349-359.
212
Zhang Guihang, “Qigong Shiyan Lunwen Shouci Zai Meiguo Kexue Zazhi Shang Fabiao”
(Qigong Experiment Result Published by US Science Journal for the First Time), CYSQA, May 11,
1999, http://www.yanxinqigong.cn/xueshu/temp_xueshu06.htm.
213
Such was the title of a journal article summarizing the findings of Qigong experiments with a noted
Qigong master Yan Xin. I am not disputing the validity of such experiments – an undertaking befitting
scientists rather than a layperson such as myself, but merely commenting on the fact that science is
constantly invoked as the ground of legitimation. Yan Xin et al, “External Qi of Yan Xin Qigong
Induces Apoptosis and Inhibits Migration and Invasion of Estrogen-independent Breast Cancer Cells
through Suppression of Akt/NF-kB Signaling,” Cell Physiol Biochem 25 no.2:263-70. An abstract of
the same article is available at
http://www.theparacast.com/forum/threads/external-qi-energy-transmission-proven-by-mayo-clinic-an
d-its-ancient-lineage.8606/. As a matter of fact, Yan Xin Qigong has made commendable efforts at
341

working with the scientific community to validate the existence and effect of Qi. See for instance Hui
Lin, “Breakthroughs in Cancer and Health Research Announced by Yan Xin Life Science,” Science
Blog, April 4, 2002, http://scienceblog.com/community/older/archives/K/3/pub3491.html.
214
Yan Xin Qi Gong, “scientific research,”2005, http://yanxinqigong.net/research/index.htm.
215
Drew Hempel, “The Highest Technology of All Technologies: The Yan Xin Secret,” May 2006,
http://www.breakingopenthehead.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5307.
216
Yan Xin Qi Gong, “About Dr. Yan Xin,” 2005, http://yanxinqigong.net/aboutdryan/bush.htm.
217
Drew Hempel, “The Highest Technology of All Technologies.”
218
The first child ever to be identified to have extra-sensorial ability was Tang Yu, who accidentally
displayed that he could “guess at words” through his ears. His story was published by the local
newspaper. Following Tang Yu, a number of kids popped up claiming they had the ability. Inspired by
their presence, researchers from Beijing University selected a group of ten ten-year-olds and taught
them meditation and breathing methods of Qigong. After a short training period, it was reported that
six of them had acquired the same ability. Since then, it gradually became a consensus that children,
because of being less “polluted” by the modern world, still retain some of the latent functions of the
human body. Zhang Naiming, “Dazu Xian Faxian Yige Nengyong Erduo Renzi De Ertong” (Dazu
County Has Discovered a Child Who Can Guess at Words through Ears)” Sichuan Daily, March 11,
1979.
219
Renben:“Zhongguo Teyi Gongneng Ershi Nian” (“Twenty Years of Chinese Extraordinary
Powers”), Oct 9, 2009, http://www.rbw.org.cn/Article.aspx?i=uzW&langu=f.
220
Palmer invented the concept of “Qigong realm.” See his Qigong Fever.
221
Quoted from Palmer’s Qigong Fever, 56-90.
222
Ibid.
223
According to Evelyn Mocollier, these “research societies” are crucial in providing some
semblance of “administrative legitimacy” and “management expertise” to Qigong groups when the
state policy toward informal groups was not clear. Also, as Micollier has noted, they “contribute
toward building such a particular civil society in China…not drawn from the Western approach based
on the state-society opposition” but highlighted the “‘semi-official-semi-civic’ nature of most Chinese
civic associations.” Micollier, “Qigong Groups and Civil Society in P.R. China.”
224
John Lee (Caltech physicist), in discussion with the author, May 12, 2009
225
Xu, “Qigong and Body Discourse.”
226
Ownby: Falun Gong.
227
Richard Broughton, Parapsychology: The Controversial Science (Rider and Company: 1991). A
brief recount of Zhang Baosheng’s story is available at
http://www.synchrosecrets.com/synchrosecrets/?p=747.
228
The military’s involvement in parapsychology and para-science is an established genre. See for
instance Jim Schnabel, “Paranormal Soldier: John Alexander from Special Services to spoon-benders
and UFOs,” Fortean Times, 2011,
http://www.forteantimes.com/features/interviews/3571/paranormal_soldier_john_alexander.html.
229 Zhang Zhenhuan, “Qigong Zonheng Tan” (Random Thoughts on Qigong) (speech, the First Zen
Meditation Studies Conference, Shantou, Guangong, Feb 13, 1992),
http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_51e66fcb0100sv49.html
230 Ibid.
231 Qian Xuesen, “Extraordinary Powers Represent a Scientific Revolution More Significant than
Quantum Theory” (speech, the Third Expansive Conference of Chinese Human Body Science
Association, Beijing, Oct 16, 1982).
232
For researches examining the intersecting of sci-fi with religion, see Carole M. Cusack, Invented
Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith (Surrey, UK and Birlington, USA: Ashgate, 2010), Douglas
E. Cowan, “Seeing the Savior in the Stars: Religion, Conformity, and The Day the Earth Stood Still,”
Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 21, no. 1; Matthew Etherden, “ ‘The Day the Earth Stood
Still’: 1950’s Sci-Fi, Religion and the Alien Messiah” Journal of Religion and Film 9, no.2 .
233
Zhang Pin, “Kexue De Shoumen Ren, Yu Guangyuan” [Yu Guangyu, Guarding the Gate to
342

Science], Science and Atheism 6 (2003), available at
http://www.kxwsl.com/ReadNews.asp?NewsID=1733.
234
Qian Xuesen (Tsien Hsue-Shen), “Yanxin Qigong Kexue Shiyan Jieguo Pingyu,” (Comments on
the Publication of Yanxin Qigong Experiments), May, 1987, available at http://yanxinqigong.net/.
235
A mini-biography of Qian Xuesen (aka “Tsien Hsue-shen”) can be found at the Caltech-penned
obituary of him posted at http://today.caltech.edu/today/story-display.tcl?story_id=39604.
236
For a sample Qigong historiography which traces its starting point to Lau Tsu, visit
http://www.shen-nong.com/eng/lifestyles/chinese_qi_gong_history.html.
237
John Lee (Caltech physicist), in discussion with the author, May 12 , 2009.
238
Li Hongzhi, Lecture 2, Zhuan Falun.
239
Li Hongzhi, Lecture 4, Zhuan Falun.
240
Qian Xuesen, “talk” (speech, China Qigong Science Research Meeting, Beijing, Feb 23, 1986),
http://www.xlzy188.com/simple/?t791.html.
241
Pang Ming, “Fazhen Qigong Wenhua Wei Ershi Yi Shiji Renlei Wenming Zuo Gongxian”
(Advance the Qigong Culture to Contribute to the 21
st
Century Human Civilization) (speech, Huaxia
Intelligence Qigong Cultivation Center, Hebei, Feb 23, 1998),
http://www.znqg.com/books/node/2022.
242
Guangming Daily, “Editorial,” Guangming Daily, July 29, 1986.
243
Zhang Zhenhuan, Zhang Zhenhuan weiji: renti kexue bufen [Works of Zhang Zhenhuan: somatic
science section] (Beijing: Global Culture Publishing House,1999).
244
Qian Xuesen, the Epistles of Qian Xuesen [Qian Xuesen Shuxin Xuan] (Beijing: the Publishing
House of the National Defense Industry, 2008).
245
Qian Xuesen, “Strategies for Human Body Science Research” (paper presented at Somatic
Science Research Society, Beijing, May, 1986)
246
Qian Xuesen, "Jianli Weixiang Qigong Xue" (Establishing a phenomenology of Qigong) in Yan
Xin Fangtan Lu (Interviews with Yan Xin) (Beijing: Friendship Publishing House, 1998), 1-8.
247
He Chongyin, “Concluding Speech” (Speech given at The Fourth Pan-China Academic
Conference on Somatic Science), Beijing, Nov 19, 1997; its Chinese transcript is available at
http://www.moon-soft.com/program/bbs/readelite81224.htm.
248
Qian Xuesen, "Jianli Weixiang Qigong Xue" (Establishing a phenomenology of Qigong). Qian
Xueseng’s involvement in Qigong, now considered by the Chinese authorities as a minor blemish on
his otherwise glorious career, is erased from his official biography.
249
Li Hongzhi, “Lecture 6” in Zhuan Falun, available at
http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/zfl_61.htm.
250
The quote is from New Religious Movements scholar Hanegraaf who writes that “One of the
notable characteristics of New Age thinking is to legitimate a spiritual worldview and attack the
existing scientific consensus.” Hanegraff, New Age Religion and Western Culture, 62.
251
Noah Porter, Falun Gong in the US: An Ethnography Study; Susan Palmer and David Ownby,
“ Falun Dafa Practitioners: A Preliminary Research Report.” Nicholos Kristof, “Tear Down This
Cyberwall!” New York Times, June 17, 2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/opinion/18kristof.html.
252
Li Hongzhi, “Prelude,” Zhuan Falun, http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/lecture0.html.
253
Li, “Lecture 1,” Zhuan Falun, http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/zfl_15.htm.
254
Ibid.
255
Li Hongzhi, “Further Comments on Superstition,” in Essentials for Further Advancement II,
http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/jjyz2_06.htm; Li Hongzhi, “On Mixin” [Superstition], in
Essentials for Further Advancement, http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/jjyz29.htm.
256
Li, “Prelude,” Zhuan Falun, http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/lecture0.html.
257
Li, “Teaching the Fa at the Conference in Europe,”
http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/lectures/19980530L.html.
258
In “What is Mixin (Superstition),” Li quips that “Isn’t it true that some people’s trust in modern
science or modern medicine is also mi xin?”
343

259
Li, “Teaching the Fa at the Conference in Europe.”
260
Ibid.
261
Li, “Lecture 7,” Zhuan Falun, http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/lecture7.html#5.
262
Li, “Teaching the Fa at Lantau Island,” Zhuan Falun II,
http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/zfl2.htm#1.
263
Li, “Lecture 3” and “Lecture 6 in Zhuan Falun,
http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/lecture3.html#9.
264
In fact, Li is not alone in defining Qi as matter-energy equivalence. The renowned Beijing
University philosopher Zhang Dainian, years earlier than Li Hongzhi, raised the point that “perhaps
the best translation of the Chinese word Qi is provided by Einstein’s equation: e=mc2. According to
this equation, matter and energy are convertible...Qi embraces both.” Zhang Dainian. Key Concepts in
Chinese Philosophy, 45-63.
265
Li, “Lecture 2,” Zhuan Falun, http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/lecture2.html#4.
266
Li, “Lecture 1,” Zhuan Falun, http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/lecture1.html#6.
267
Ibid.
268
Ibid.
269
Li Hongzhi, “Lecture 2,” Zhuan Falun, http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/lecture2.html#4
270
Li Hongzhi, “Lecture in Sidney,” http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/lectures/1996L.html.
271
Li Hongzhi, “Teaching the Fa at the Conference in Europe,”
http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/lectures/19980530L.html.
272
Li, “Lecture 2,” Zhuan Falun, http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/zfl_new_2.html#4.
273
Li, “Lecture 1,” Zhuan Falun.
274
Charles Y. Glock and Robert N. Bellah, “New Quasi-religious Movements,” in The New Religious
Consciousness, eds Glock and Bellah, (Berkeley: Univ of California Press, 1976), 75.
275
Nancy Chen, “Urban Spaces and Experiences of Qigong,” in Urban Spaces in Contemporary
China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Post Mao China, ed, Davis et al, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 347.

Chapter 4

276
The exact number of Falun Gong followers is a matter of dispute. The communist government
once put the tally at 70 million, while the Falun Gong source estimates there were roughly 100 million
prior to the ban. Ownby contends that the membership between Falun Gong and other Qigong schools
is shared. My own experience affirms Ownby’s view. Ownby, Falun Gong and the Future of China;
Seth Faison, "In Beijing: A Roar of Silent Protestors", New York Times, April 27, 1999.
277
Allan Young, “The Anthropologies of Illness and Sickness,” Annual Review of Anthropology 11
(1982), 257-285.
278
Meredith McGuire, “Religion and Healing,” in Sacred in a Secular Age: Toward Revision in the
Scientific Study of Religion, ed. Philip Hammond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985),
270.
279
George Foster and Barbara Anderson, Medical Anthropology, (New York: John Wiley and Sons,
1978), 53.
280
Naturalistic models such as the Hippocratic humoral system, the medical theory of yin/yang and
the ayurvedic dosha system all adopt an equilibrium perspective on health.
281
Sered and Barns, “Series Forward,” Faith, Health and Healing in African American Life, eds.
Michem and Townes, (Connecticut: Praeger, 2008), xii.
282
The idealistic tradition views the body as tarnishing the efficacy and the holiness of the mind.
283
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment: the Birth of Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Vintage
Books, 1979).
284
Elizabeth Grosz succinctly distinguishes two contrasting approaches to the body, namely the
“outside in” – referring to the socially and historically inscribed body, exemplified by theorists such as
Nietzsche, Foucault and Deleuze -- and the “inside out,” represented by Freud, Lacan, and
344

Merleau-Ponty. Grosz’s Volatile Bodies, Toward a Corporal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana Univ
Press, 1994).
285
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
286
It is no incident that “Leib,” meaning “body” in Germany, shares etymological root with “life.”
Thomas Ots “The Silenced Body-the expressive Leib: on the dialectic of mind and life in Chinese
cathartic healing.” In Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, ed.
Thomas Csordas (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 1994), 116-139.
287
Thomas Csordas ed., Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self.
288
Joseph Alter, “The Body of One Color: Indian Wrestling, the Indian State, and Utopian Somatics,”
Cultural Anthropology 8, No. 1 (1993), 49-72.
289
Lin and Wang, “Confucius’ Teachings of Virtues,” In Spirituality, Religion and Peace Education,
eds by Brantmeier et al, (Information Age Publishing, 2010), 1-19.
290
Samantha Senda-Cook, “Rugged Practices: Embodying Authenticity in Outdoor Recreation,”
Quarterly Journal of Speech 98 no.2, 129-152. Dana Cloud also reminds us that “discourse is not the
only thing that matters in critical project.” Dana L. Cloud, ‘‘The Materiality of Discourse as
Oxymoron: A Challenge to Critical Rhetoric,’’ Western Journal of Communication 58 (1994): 141.
291
Erving Goffman is credited with devising the notion of “framing.” To him frames are “interpretive
schemata” of meaning made significant by the cultural context in which framing occurs.
292
Elizabeth Thornton, “Framing dissent in contemporary China: Irony, ambiguity and metonymy,”
The China Quarterly 171 (2002), 661-681.
293
David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, "Master frames and cycles of protest," in Frontiers in
Social Movement Theory, ed. Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1992), 133-156; Snow and Benford ,"Ideology, frame resonance, and participant
mobilization" International Social Movement Research 1, (1988): 197–217.
294
Leland Griffin, “A Dramatistic Theory of the Rhetoric of Movements.”
295
John Hannigan, “Social Movement Theory and the Sociology of Religion: Toward a New
Synthesis,” Sociological Analysis 52, no. 4:131-133.
296
Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 58.
297
Rey Chow, Writing diaspora: tactics of intervention in contemporary cultural studies, 385.
298
Scott defines infrapolitics as “the elemental forms of political life, or crowds, carnival, gossip, and
many other social forms where subordinated groups resist domination through authorized reversals
and other metaphorical expression of hidden criticism.” James Scott, Domination and the arts of
resistance: hidden transcripts (New Haven, Conn: Yale Univ. Press, 1993), 183.
299
Thornton, “Framing dissent.”
300
Even by China’s official historical account, the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution is a time of
national nightmare in which societal upheavals and political turmoil brought along excruciating
sufferings. Tens of millions were affected by political assault, public humiliation, imprisonment and
murder, with cadres purged, intellectuals exiled, youths sent down to farms or turned into Red Guards
committed to “smashing the old world”. The upturned value system led to students beating up teachers,
friends betraying friends, and family turning against each other. By the time the Cultural Revolution
was ended, the sense of bitterness and loss was so rampant that every institution China had ever had
was cast in doubt. For first-hand accounts of the period in the form of memoirs and oral histories see
Nien Chen’s Life and Death in Shanghai (New York: Grove Press, 1988), and Arthur Kleinman’s
What Really Matters: living a moral life amidst uncertainty and danger (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006).
301
Tu Weiming observes that the Cultural Revolution was a “spiritual holocaust” which shattered
China’s ethical and value systems. When it was over, basic civility such as “good morning” and
“thank you” had to be re-taught and relearned. Tu Weiming, “Destructive Will and Ideological
Holocaust: Maosim as a Source of Suffering in China,” in Social Suffering , ed. Kleinman et al
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, Univ of California Press, 1997).
302
Gereme Barme, “History For the Masses,” in Using the Past to Serve the Present: Historiography
and Politics in Contemporary China, ed Jonathan Unger (London: ME Sharpe, 1993), 261.
345

303
The period between 1978 (Deng’s consolidation of power) to 1989 (the Tiananmen Movement) is
regarded as China’s tumultuous “long decade.” Gregory Lee argues that the “long decade” is also a
“lost” decade. He writes: “ ‘Lost’ in the sense that the political engagement of intellectuals and makers
of culture has been occulted by official history-telling; ‘lost’ also in that its memory has been
abandoned even by many who lived through it; ‘lost’ also in the embarrassed silence of those who
prefer to focus on the economic miracle of the 1990s that gave rise to today's more prosperous China;
and ‘lost’ as a time of opportunity for cultural and political change that ultimately did not happen.”
Gregory Lee, China’s Lost Decade: Culture, Politics and Poetics (Tigre de Papier, 2009).
304
Perry Link, Roses and Thorns: The Second blooming of the Hundred Flowers in Chinese Fiction.
305
Feng Jicai, “Pu Hua De Qi Lu” (“A Deviant Path littered with Flowers”), Shouhuo (Harvest) 2
(1980). Originally titled “Scar,” this novel is considered one of the canonical works of the Scar
Literature genre.
306
The Scar Literature was terminated prematurely when authorities feared that self-examination and
historical revisionism characteristic of the Scar Literature would go out of bounds to the extent of
“attacking socialism itself.”
307
Other notable contemporaneous social movements that were also shut down were the “Beijing
Spring” movement in 1977-78 and the pan-China “culture debate” on how to assess Chinese culture
and history. Both of these movements, like the Scar Literature, were led by intellectuals.
308
Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman, “How Bodies Remember: Social Memory and Bodily
Experience of Criticism, Resistance, and Delegitimation following China's Cultural Revolution,” New
Literary History 25, no.3: 707-723.
309
In Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People's Republic, Susan
Brownell also notes a similar sense of “drain” and “hunger” experienced by the Chinese athletes
raised by the official coaching system. Never having suffered any lack of material nutrients, the
athletes’ felt sense of “hunger” was attributable to a “hunger for athletic success and ultimately to the
security such success brings” in the hierarchical system. Hunger thus “refers to the lack of fulfillment
of personal aspirations and desires” – a hunger as symbolic as it could be material. Brownell, Training
the Body for China (Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press, 1995) 259-260.
310
C.R. Janes, “The Health Transition, Global Modernity and the Crisis of Traditional Medicine: the
Tibetan Case,” Social Science & Medicine 48 (1999): 1803-1820.
311
Christianity used to (and in some cases still do) explain illness through a mixture of natural,
spiritual and moral meanings. Diseases are understood to be divine punishments by God for
wrong-doings. Each of the seven deadly sins has their corresponding marks and symptoms in the body.
It is customary for individuals to examine their moral conducts – based on the symbols reflected in the
body -- to reflect on how they have brought illnesses upon themselves.
312
Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 503-517.
313
Kleinman & Kleinman,“Somatization: the Interconnections in Chinese Society among Culture,
Depressive Dxperiences, and the Meanings of Pain”. In Culture and Depression, ed Kleinman and
Good (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 429–490.
314
James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, 1990), 141.
315
Clearwisdom Editors, Life and Hope Reviewed: the Healing Power of Falun Dafa” (New Jersey:
Minghui Publishing, 2008),
http://en.minghui.org/emh/download/publications/JCFS_2ndEd_whole_book.pdf.
316
Some scholars attribute the popularity of Qigong to the collapse of the state socialist healthcare
system which compelled the population to look elsewhere for non-mainstream treatments. While
acknowledging the validity of that view, I contend that simplifying Qigong and Falun Gong’s appeal
to mere practical concerns would dilute the critical edge of the self-healing movement.
317
Mrs. Yu (retired teacher) in discussion with the author, Jan 2008.
318
On the prevalence of extra-marital affairs in China, see Anthony Kuhn, “China Debates Morality,
Exploitation of Women,” NPR, Jan 20, 2007,
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6924667; Leopold219, “Why does extramarital
affair occur very often in China?” TravelChinaGuide, Feb 19, 2008,
346

http://community.travelchinaguide.com/forum2.asp?i=43882; Carolyn Monihan, “the price of
progress in China, ” Mecatornet, Aug 10, 2011, http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/9526.
319
Thomas Ots, “The Silenced Body -- the Expressive Leib: on the Dialectic of Mind and Life in
Chinese Cathartic Healing,” 127; Michelle Rosaldo “Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling.”
In Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion. eds. Shweder and LeVine, (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), 137–157.
320
Mrs. Wang (a retired government clerk) in discussion with the author, May 2006.
321
Francis Hsu, The self in cross-cultural perspective (New York : Tavistock Publications, 1985).
322
Lucy Zhou, “It is not a sect,” Ottawa Citizen, April 30, 1999.
323
Mrs. Wu (a retired pharmacist) in discussion with the author, June 2007.
324
Donald MacInnis, Religion in China Today: Policy and Practice (New York: Orbis Books, 1989)
120-121.
325
Ms. Hu (a retiree) in discussion with the author, Oct 2008.
326
Peter Berger, Sacred Canopy, 46, 58.
327
Peter Morrela, “The Historical Basis for Integrated Medicine,” December 2000,
http://www.homeoint.org/morrell/otherarticles/historical.htm.
328
Burke’s entire quotation is: “(Identification) ranges from the bluntest quest of advantage, as in
sales promotion or propaganda, through courtship, social etiquette, education, and the sermon, to a
'pure' form that delights in the process of appeal for itself alone, without ulterior purpose. And
identification ranges from the politician who, addressing an audience of farmers, says, 'I was a farm
boy myself,' through the mysteries of social status, to the mystic's devout identification with the
sources of all being." Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 224.
329
Anonymous, “A Life Plagued by Chronic Illness Is renewed,” 2010,
http://clearwisdom.net/emh/download/ebooks/e034.htm.
330
Li Hongzhi, Guangzhou Lecture (speech given at Falun Gong lecture series in Guangzhou, China,
1994).
331
Ms. Gao (retired radio host) in personal communication with the author, Jan 2008.
332
Ots calls Qigong-related crying an “embodied catharsis.” Ots, “silenced body,” 130.
333
Mrs. Zhang (a business woman) in discussion with the author, Feb 2008.
334
Ots, “Silenced Body,” 128-29.
335
Scott, Hidden Transcript, 64.
336
Griffin, “A Dramatic Theory of the Rhetoric of Movements.”
337
NRMs tend to value “intuition”, “epiphany” and “mystic gnosis” over conventional knowledge
obtainable through instrumental rationality and doctrinal teaching. John Saliba’s Understanding New
Religious Movements (Walnut Creek, California: Altamira Press, 2003), 38-40. James Lewis, The
Oxford handbook of new religious movements (Oxford: the Oxford University Press, 2008).
338
Christine Korischek , “Qigong and Trauma” (Paper presented for the conference SHEN –
Interculturality and Psychotherapy in Vienna, June 10-13, 2010),
http://www.ipcm-vienna.at/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Paper-korischek.pdf.
339
Ots, “The Silenced Body.”
340
Lyon and Barbalet, “Society’s Body: Emotion and the “Somatization” of Social Theories,” in
Embodiment and Experience: the Existential Ground of Culture and Self. ed. Csordas (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994 ),48.
341
Ots suggests that the Cartesian body construct is best expressed in “Korper” – a receptacle for
mind; he suggests to use the German “Leib” to convey the sense of body-being-existentially-alive. It
is no coincidence that “Leib” bears a resemblance to the English word “life” and to “libido.” Ots, “The
Silenced Body,” 128.
342
Kleinman and Kleinman, “How Bodies Remember,” 708.
343
Burgdoff, “How Falun Gong Practice Undermines Li Hongzhi’s Totalistic Rhetoric.” Nova Religio
6. no2: 332-347.
344
Li, “Lecture 1” in Zhuan Falun.
345
Li, Jinan Lecture.
347

346
Zhao Yuezhi, “Falun Gong, Identity, and the Struggle over Meaning inside and outside China.”
347
Li Hongzhi, “Lecture 1” in Zhuan Falun.
348
Ibid.
349
Peter Berger, Sacred Canopy, 65.
350
Li, “Wealth with Virtue” in Essentials for Further Advancement.
351
Ibid.
352
Berger, Sacred Canopy, 102.
353
The perspective of moral universe postulates a divine order founded on benign equitability which
regulates all interactions in fair terms. As Li Hongzhi writes, “There is a principle in this universe
called ‘no loss, no gain’. To gain, one has to lose. If you do not want to lose, you will be forced to lose.
Who plays such a role? It is precisely the characteristic of the universe that assumes this role. Thus, it
is impossible if you only wish to gain things.” Hence, no suffering or gain is unfounded, as a Buddhist
axiom instructs, "God does not make one suffer for no reason nor does He make one happy for no
reason. God is very fair and gives you exactly what you deserve. ” Li Hongzhi, “Lecture 1” in Zhuan
Falun.
354
Ibid.
355
Ms. Yim (a designer) in discussion with the author, Feb 2009.
356
Frank Lin (a computer programmer) in discussion with the author, Feb 2009.
357
Xu Yin, “Qinghua Daxue Jiaoshou Zishu Shou Pohai Jingli” (“Memoir of a Tsinghua Univ.
Professor”), Sept 10, 2008, Minghui, http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2008/9/10/185630.html. On
a side note, in contemporary China, it is not rare for disillusioned activists to espouse God instead. So
the political and spiritual tracks do meet. Ian Johnson, “Jesus versus Mao? An Interview with Yuan
Zhiming,” New York Review of Book, Sept 4, 2012.
358
Claus Offe, “New social movements, challenging the boundaries of institutional politics,” Social
Research, 52: 817-68. Alain Touraine. The voices and the Eye: An Analysis of Social Movements
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 1981), 97-99. Blumer defines religious movements in a
disparaging light: they are "expressive movements" not engaged in releasing their tension through
effecting outward political revolutions and ideological change. Herbert Blumer “Social Movements,”
New outlines of the Principles of Sociology, ed. Alfred Lee, (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1951),
199-220.
359
The Mencius motto can also be translated as “one is to cultivate himself when he is impoverished
(of resources) and to better the world when he is rich (with power and wealth).”
360
Anthropologists have recorded how the Tiananmen Massacre influenced the state of the body
circumscribed in the socio-political context of post-1989. Nancy Chen came across a patient who
committed himself to the mental ward. According the patient, shortly after the Tiananmen Massacre,
when he took a walk near Tiananmen, he got into a fit. The guard at the Square gave him two options:
either to be taken away as a political prisoner or check himself into a psychiatric institute. Chen,
Breathing Space, 68; Thomas Ots, on revisiting Beijing’s parks after Tiananmen, remarks that the
once vibrant scene of body praxis---Qigong, taichi, disco-dancing, etc -- was all gone, leaving in its
place a dense pall of sadness. Ots, “Silenced Body,” 108.
361
Yearning was hailed as a “milestone” in China’s TV history; it literally “emptied the streets” when
on air. “Yearnings/Aspirations,” in Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture, ed. Ed Davis
(New York: Rutledge, 2005), 969.
362
Yuezhi Zhao, “Falun Gong, Identity, and the Struggle over Meaning Inside and Outside China.”
363
Ibid.
364
Paula Peterson, “Confucianism, The Way of Self-Cultivation,” Spirit of Ma'at 3 no 7.
365
Li, Jinan Lecture, 1996. A 2011 Gallup Poll found that around 90% of the Chinese rate their level
of wellbeing as “struggling” or “suffering,” running contrarian to what people might assume. A Wall
Street Journal article comments on the poll result: “With a roaring economy, gleaming new
infrastructure and a rising profile on the world stage, one might assume China’s people are feeling
pretty good about their lives these days. Not so.” The sentiment revealed in the Gallup Poll has been
unanimously confirmed by my Chinese informants who also add that things have been like that for
348

the past two decades. Wall Street Journal, “Gallop: Chinese People See Themselves Struggling,”
Wall Street Journal, April 11, 2011.
366
Li, “Lecture 2,” Zhuan Falun.
367
It is a recurrent motif in theology to conceive of natural disasters and human illnesses as instances
of divine punishment. One of the most recent instances was when the governor of Tokyo proclaimed
the 2011 Japanese tsunami was “necessary… to wash away the greedy minds” of Japan. Japan Probe:
“Tokyo Governor: Earthquake Was Divine Punishment,” March 15, 2011, Japan Probe.
368
Paul Peterson, “Confucianism: The Way of Self-Cultivation,” 2003,
http://www.spiritofmaat.com/archive/feb3/cnfcnism.htm.
369
Li, Jinan Lecture.
370
Ibid.
371
The network model Li postulates is thus described in lecture 9 of Zhuan Falun: “If every one of us
cultivates his inner self, examines his own character to look for the causes of wrongdoing so as to do
better next time, and considers others first when taking any action, human society would become
better and ethical standards would again rise. The societal morale would also become better, and so
would public security. Perhaps there would not be any police. No one would need to be governed, as
everyone would discipline him or herself and search their inner self. Wouldn’t you say this would be
great? You know that laws are becoming more comprehensive and impeccable. Yet why are there
people who still do bad deeds? Why don’t they comply with the laws? It is because you cannot govern
their hearts.” Li, “Lecture 9,” in Zhuan Falun.
372
Hannigan, “Social Movement Theory and the Sociology of Religion.”
373
Li, Jinan Lecture
374
There was one government-led probe into the civil effects of Falun Gong. In 1998, Qiao Shi, the
retired Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, initiated an
investigation into Falun Gong. It is said that he then summarized his findings in a report titled “Falun
Gong has hundreds of benefits for the Chinese people and nation, and does not do a bit of harm.”
Falun Gong practitioners have since hung onto the same report to defend their practice against
detractors.
375
Indeed, the opportunity of being featured on public stage were cherished and treated as a
triumphant moment for Falun Gong. To continue the Confucian gentleman analogy, it amounted to the
vindication of the once exiled aspirant politician to have finally returned to court and fulfilled his
calling to his king. Scholars have noticed the unclear line between the state and the Falun Gong group
prior to the falling-out as a large number of Falun Gong followers were at the same time Party
members loyal to the central leadership.
376
China Youth Daily, “Shengming De Jieri” (A Festival to Celebrate Life), China Youth Daily, Aug
28, 1998. A photocopy of the newspaper clipping is posted at
www.minghui.org/mh/article_images/2001-3-16-qingningbao.jpg.
377
Ibid.
378
Ibid.
379
Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 115.
380
Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 22.

Chapter 5

381
Nancy Chen, Breathing Space; Noah Porter, Falun Gong in the United States.
382
Hugh Duncan, Communication and Social Order.
383
Elizabeth Perry,”Challenging The Mandate Of Heaven: Popular Protest in Modern China.”
384
For instance, John Pomphre once dismissed the Falun Gong founder as a “trumpet player and
night watchman,” and “most of Falun Gong's followers are retired or unemployed.” John Pemphre,
"China Said to Detain 35,000 in Sect," Washington Post, November 29, 1999.
385
Merle Goldman, “Why Falun Gong has the Chinese government so nervous,” Talk of the Nation,
NPR, August 2, 1999.
349

386
Judy Woodruff and Rebecca MacKinnon, “U.S. Urges China to Avoid Punitive Action Against
Spiritual Group,” CNN, July 27, 1999.
387
John Leicester, “China's Crackdown on Sect Analyzed,” Associated Press, July 23, 1999. A
correction is in order here: Chronologically, it was the western media who started the “cult” and “sect”
label first, being situated where they were, which amounted to handing over to Beijing a perfect tool
to frame Falun Gong. Almost five months later, in Oct 1999, the Chinese government picked it up as a
hot button phrase. Other instances of borrowing catch phrases from the West to rebrand domestic
dissent include Beijing’s adoption of “terrorism” post 9/11 to refer to the pro-independence movement
in the province of Xinjiang, aka East Turkestan.
388
The Chinese leadership refrained from releasing any definitive directives – at least not in the
public realm -- about Falun Gong in the wake of its mass protest. Now in retrospect, it has become
known that the regime was preparing for a coordinated surprise attack in hope of “resolving the Falun
Gong issue” in one strike. Hence, a three-month long hiatus occurred between the mass protest and the
beginning of the anti-Falun Gong campaign.
389
“China Bans Meditation Group,” Associated Press, July 22, 1999.
390
4/25 is considered to be the point of departure for Falun Gong as a protest movement. As such, its
interpretation is also a major point of contention between Falun Gong and the CCP. See for example
the Falun Gong timeline compiled and posted at http://clearwisdom.net/html/index.html. Also refer to
a NTDTV-produced mini-documentary titled “April 25
th
, the Protest that Changed China forever,”
April 20, 2009, available at
http://english.ntdtv.com/ntdtv_en/pg_ShortFilms/2009-04-20/827612905672.html.
391
Ethan Gutmann, “How the War Against Falun Gong Started,” the Epochtimes, April 24, 2009.
392
“Anti-Falun Gong special news program,” CCTV, July 23, 1999, quoted in NPR, “Chinese
Government bans the Popular Semi-religious Sect Known as Falun Gong,” NPR, July 26, 1999.
393
Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 101.
394
James Aune, Rhetoric and Marxism (Boulder, Co: Westview Press Inc, 1994), 1.
395
James Aune, Rhetoric and Marxism, 143.
396
Jiang, “Speech to the Assembly of the Politburo of the Central Committee of CCP” (a speech
given to the Politburo of the Central Committee of CCP, Beijing, June 7, 1999), its Chinese transcript
available at http://beijingspring.com/bj2/2001/60/2003727210907.htm; my translation.
397
Jiang, “Letter to the Politburo on April 25, 1999,” April 25, 1999, its Chinese transcript available
at http://beijingspring.com/bj2/2001/60/2003727210907.htm; my translation. “Leader of Falun Gong
Appeals to Authorities to Reconsider Their Actions in Banning the Sect,” NPR, July 23, 1999.
398
Jiang, “Letter.”
399
Jiang, “Speech.”
400
Jiang, “Speech.”
401
Ibid.
402
In On Justification Boltanski and Thévenot identify six polities. Among them, civic polity is
concerned with “legality” as the supreme worth. Boltanski and Thevenot, On Justification.
403
Elizabeth Perry, Challenging the Mandate of Heaven: Social Protest and State Power in China
(Armonk, New
York & London, England: M.E. Sharp, 2002), XXII.
404
Jiang, “Speech.”
405
“Elevating Understanding,”, People’s daily, July 23, 1999.
406
“Urgent Editorial,” Xinhua News Agency, July 22, 1999; “Major mass organizations support Falun
Gong Ban”. Xinhua News Agency, July 24, 1999; “Non-communist Parties Figures Support Falun
Gong Ban”, Xinhua News Agency, July 23, 1999; my italics.
407
Ibid.
408
“Life and times of Li Hongzhi,” Xinhua News Agency, July 22, 1999.
409 “Li Hongzhi’s mother,” Xinhua News Agency, July 28, 1999.
410
“Li Hongzhi Defrauds People of Money,” Xinhua News Agency, August 6, 1999; “New Evidence
of Falun Gong Leader’s Fraudulent Behavior Found,” Xinhua News Agency, August 5, 1999; “True
350

Face of Li Hongzhi Exposed,” Xinhua News Agency, July 22, 1999.
411
“China’s theoretical bimonthly refutes Falun Gong’s fallacies,” Xinhua News Agency , July 26,
1999; “Chinese magazine repudiates Falun Gong fallacies,” Xinhua News Agency, July 30, 1999;
“Chinese scientists on Falun Gong,” Xinhua News Agency, July 26, 1999.
412
“People’s Daily Editorial,” Xinhua News Agency, July 25, 1999.
413
“People’s Daily Editorial,” Xinhua News Agency, July 22 and July 25, 1999.
414
“PLA and armed police support government ban on Falun Gong,” Xinhua News Agency, July 24,
1999.
415
Ibid.
416
Boltanski and Thévenot, On Justification, 62, 96 and 162.
417
Ibid, 198.
418
“China Bans Falun Gong: CPC Central Committee Forbids Party Members to Practice Falun
Gong,” People’s Daily, July 19, 1999.
419
James Tong, Revenge of the Forbidden City.
420
Elizabeth Perry, “Challenging the mandate of heaven: Popular protest in modern China.”
421
James Tong, Revenge of the Forbidden City, 90.
422
“Chinese Scientists on Falun Gong, ” Xinhua News Agency, July 26, 1999.
423
“China Bans Falun Gong: Noted Scientists Urge Fight Against Pseudoscience,” People’s Daily,
July 25,1999.
424
Richard McGregor, The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers, 11.
425
Boltanski and Thevenot, On Justification, 90-96; 165-178.
426
Burke, Grammar, 127-170.
427
Ian Johnson, Wild Grass, 152.
428
Jiang, “Letter.”
429
Zong Hairen, Zhu Rongji Zai 1999 (Zhu Rongji in Year 1999) (New York: Mingjing Publishing
House, 2001); Wu Xuegang (Falun Gong practitioner rallying at Zhongnanhai on April 25, 1999) in
discussion with the author, Sept, 2009; my own italics.
430
Zong Hairen, Zhu Rongji Zai 1999.
431
“Official on rumors concerning Falun Gong practitioners,” Xinhua News Agency, June 14, 1999.
432
James Tong, The Revenge of the Forbidden City, 226.
433
Boltanski and Thévenot, On Justification, 90.
434
Dan Levin, “Chinese Athletes Say No to the System,” New York Times, Aug 18, 2011.
435
Boltanski and Thévenot, On Justification, 89-96, 167-190.
436
“The China You Do Not Know – Why Does CCP Hate Falun Gong,” Speak it Well, Taiwan
Public TV Station, Oct 16, 2009, available at http://talk.news.pts.org.tw/2009/10/vs-vs_16.html.
437
Boltanski and Thévenot, On Justification, 167-190.
438
Jiang, “Speech;” John Pomfret and Michael Laris “China Outlaws Nonconformist Spiritual Sect;
Group Had Organized Protests Across Nation,” Washington Post , July 22, 1999.
439
Erich Auerbach , Mimesis, The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Trans. Willard
Trask (Garden City, NY: Double Day, 1953), 316-26.
440
Boltanski and Thévenot, On Justification, 90-92.
441
Judicial abuse of psychiatry is a well-documented phenomenon in the former Soviet Union.
Recently, China has been put on the spotlight, too. Robin Munro, “Judicial psychiatry in China and its
political abuses,” Columbia Journal of Asian Law 14 no.1: 106-20; Robin Munro, “Political
psychiatry in post-Mao China and its origins in the Cultural Revolution,” Journal of the American
Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 30, no. 1: 97-106, and Robin Munro, “On the psychiatric abuse of
Falun Gong and other dissenters in China: a reply to Stone, Hickling, Kleinman, and Lee,” Journal of
the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law 30, no.2: 266-274; Alan Stone, “Psychiatry on the side
of the angels; Falun Gong and the Soviet Jewry,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and
Law 30, no.1: 107-111.
442
Jiang, “Speech.”
443
Michael Green, “A King Who Devours His People: Jiang Zemin and the Falun Gong Crackdown: A
351

Bibliography,” International Journal of Legal Information 34 no.3.
444
“Mitu ZhiFan – Fang Yuan Falun Gong Yunnan Fudao Zongzhan Fuzhanzhang Xu Xiaohua” (The
Return of a Strayed Child – An Interview with the Ex-Assistant Director of Yunan Falun Gong Center
Xu Xiaohua), Xinhua News Agency, July 30, 1999.
445
Zong Hairen, Zhu Rongji in Year 1999
446
Ibid.
447
Johnson, Wild Grass, 198-200.
448
Boltanski and Thevonot, On Justification, 196.
449
Cheng Guoying, “Uphold science, eradicate superstition,” August 1999, available at
http://chineseposters.net/posters/e13-891.php.
450
“Techno-nationalism” is a term coined by Richard P. Suttmeier in his “China’s Techno-Warriors,
Another View,’’ China Quarterly 179: 804-810.
451
Yuri Gagarin is rumored to have made that remark while in orbit.
452
Cheng Guoying, “Firmly support the decision of the Central Committee to deal with the illegal
organization of 'Falun Gong' ,” August, 1999, available at
http://chineseposters.net/posters/e13-892.php.
453
Boltansky and Thevenot, On Justification, 198.
454
“Stay Alert,” People’s Daily, Jan 08, 2001.
455
“People’s Daily Editorial,” Xinhua News Agency, July 27, 1999.
456
Bi Qingyu, “Yige Falun Gong Nvhai de Aiqing yu Jiating Gushi” (A Falun Gong Girl’s Love and
Family Story), the Epochtimes, Sept 15, 2006, http://www.epochtimes.com/b5/6/9/25/n1465302.htm.
457
“The Tragic Life of a Music Genius,” Clearwisdom, Jan 5, 2007 available at
http://www.falunau.org/newsArticle.jsp?itemID=1993&cat=newsChina,.
458
Li Bin (Falun Gong practitioner) in discussion wit the author, Oct 2007; Bi Qingyu, “Yige Falun
Gong Nvhai de Aiqing yu Jiating Gushi” (A Falun Gong Girl’s Love and Family Story).
459
Ibid.
460
Li Jie (Falun Gong practitioner) in discussion with the author, Oct, 2007. .
461
Li Hongzhi, “Chapter 3,” Zhuan Falun, http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/lecture3.html.
462
Julia Ching, “East Asian Religions,” in World Religions: Eastern Traditions,” ed. Willard Oxtoby
(Toronto, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 348.
463
Elizabeth Clavarie and Pierre Lamason, L'Impossible manage. Violence et parenté en Gévaudan
xviie, xviiie et xixe Siecles (Paris: Hachette Literature), 84, quoted in Boltanski and Thevenot’s On
Justification, 90.
464
Li Qingliu, “Ta Yin 4/25 Zoushang Falun Dafa Xiulian Zhilu” (The 4/25 Rally Led Her to Falun
Dafa), The Epochtimes, April 24, 2012, available at
http://www.epochtimes.com/gb/12/4/24/n3573508.htm.
465
Zhang Yun, “Toronto: Rally Commemorating the April 25 Appeal,” Clearwisdom, April 24, 2011,
available at http://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2011/4/24/124599.html.
466
Xin Yu and Wen Yun, “Sydney: Falun Gong Practitioners Commemorate April 25 Appeal and
Protest Persecution at Chinese Embassy,” Clearwisdom, April 29, 2007,
http://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2007/4/29/85030.html.
467
Zhang Yun, “Toronto: Rally Commemorating the April 25 Appeal;” Cai Ju, “New York: March
and Rally Commemorate the April 25 Appeal,” Clearwisdom, April 25, 2011,
http://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2011/4/25/124637.html; Xin Yu and Wen Yun, “Sydney: Falun
Gong Practitioners Commemorate April 25 Appeal and Protest Persecution at Chinese Embassy.”
468
Ethan Gutmann, “How the War against Falun Gong Started?” ”
469
Dan Levin, “Chinese Athletes Say No to the System,” the New York Times, April 18, 2011.
470
Johnson, Wild Grass, 248.
471
John Garnaut, “Is China Becoming a Mafia State?” (presentation, USC U.S.-China Institute
Events, Los Angeles, CA, Feb 23, 2011), available at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa4oVHz32i4.
472
Seth Faison, “Followers of Chinese Sect Defend Its Spiritual Goals,” The New York Times, July 30,
352

1999.
473
The Conscience Foundation and the Falun Gong Human Rights Working Group, “History
Unfolds,” in Falun Gong, Humanity’s Last Stand, 10-14, available at
http://www.falunhr.org/newsletter/TheLastStand-2009.pdf.
474
“Rang Women Gaosu Weilai” (Let Us Tell the Future), NTDTV, April, 2003; its Chinese transcript
available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2003/4/14/48338.html.
475
Li Hongzhi, “Some Thoughts of Mine,” June 2, 1999, available at
http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/jjyz2_02.htm.
476
Elizabeth Perry, Challenging the Mandate of Heaven: Social Protest and State Power in China
(Armonk, New York and London: M.E. Sharpe), X.
477
Boltanski and Thevenot, On Justification, 90.
478
Ibid.
479
Rang Women Gaosu Weilai (Let Us Tell the Future).
480
Li Hongzhi, “Some Thoughts of Mine,” June 2, 1999.
481
Some argue that the Confucian obeisance to authority coupled with Stalinist authoritarianism has
produced the worst kind of both. Tu Wei-ming, “A Confucian Life in America,” A World of Ideas
with Bill Moyers, 1988, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxBJUc4wVms.
482
Evelyne Micollier, “Qigong Groups and Civil Society in P.R. China;” Kevin O’Brien and
Jianjiang Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press,
2006), 120.

Chapter 6

483
James Lewis, Violence and New Religious Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011);
Bromley and Melton’s Cults, religion, and violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2002).
Scholars agree that the “legitimacy controversy” concerning alternative religions is primarily due to
the sense of insecurity felt by the establishment.
484
My research found that a heavily mediated event such as Falun Gong’s self-immolation had the
surreal effect of blurring reality with simulacrum that some TV viewers, in their recollections, claimed
they watched the event unfold “live” on TV. Similar mental processes have been noted by Marita
Sturken in relation to viewers of the Zapruder film. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam
War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997).
485
Rob Gifford, “Falun Gong under Attack,” NPR, February 13, 2001.
486
John Pomfret and Philip P. Pan, “Washington Post: Torture Is Breaking Falun Gong: China
Systematically Eradicating Group,” Washington Post, August 05, 2001.
487
Clemens Ostergaard, “Governance and the Political Challenge of the Falun Gong,” in Governance
in China, ed. Jude Howell (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 207-226. Philip Pan,
“China Mulls Murder Charges for Foreign Journalists.” David Ownby, Falun Gong and the Future
of China, 218
488
Matthew Forney, “the Breaking Point,” Time, July 02, 2001.
489
Hannah Beech, “Too Hot to Handle,” Time, Feb 5, 2001.
490
Ian Johnson, "Defiant Falun Dafa Members Converge on Tiananmen". The Wall Street Journal,
April 25, 2001.
491
Danny Schecter, “The Fires This Time: Immolation or Deception in Beijing?” MediaChannel.org,
February 22, 2001.
492
Philip Pan, "One-Way Trip to the End in Beijing," International Herald Tribune, February 5,
2001.
493
World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong, “Highlights of Investigation of
the Alleged Self-Immolation in Tiananmen Square," May 12, 2003,
http://www.zhuichaguoji.org/en/sites/zhuichaguoji.org.en/files/en_209.pdf.
494
NTDTV, "False Fire, China’s Tragic New Standard in State Deception," NTDTV, 2001,
353

www.falsefire.com; Yu Haiqing, Media and Cultural Transformation in China (Oxford: Taylor &
Francis: 2009), 133 –134.
495
Hamish McDonald, "What's wrong with Falun Gong," The Age, October 16, 2004,
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/10/15/1097784013251.html?oneclick=true.
496
Ann Noonan, “Beijing is Burning: More lies from the PRC” National Review, February 13, 2001.
497
Barend ter Haar, "Falun Gong: Part One: Introductory remarks," 2001,
http://website.leidenuniv.nl/~haarbjter/faluntext2.html.
498
Michelle Young, “Still Burning, Self-Immolation as Photographic Protest,” Quarterly Journal of
Speech (97)1 (2011): 1-25.
499
Michael Biggs, “Dying without Killing: Self-Immolations, 1963-2002,” in Making Sense of
Suicide Missions, ed. Diego Gambetta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 173-208. Notable
cases include self-immolation committed by Vietnam’s Reverend Thich Quang Duc, a young
American Quaker Norman Morrison at Pentagon, Czech’s Jan Palach, and Taiwan’s “Father of
Democracy” Cheng Nan Jung. All of them, at least to some extent, are viewed positively.
500
Wright Bryan, “Self-Immolation: A Singular Form of Protest Grabs Attention Again” NPR, Jan 08,
2011.
501
I choose not to participate in the debate over the veracity of the event. A state-sponsored
conspiracy against Falun Gong is a plausible theory by all accounts, but I think the mystery is best
solved through third-party investigation or, in due course, voluntary divulging of secretes by the
Chinese state.
502
Jerold Schecter, the New Face of Buddha: Buddhism and Political Power in Southeast Asia (New
York: Coward-McCann, 1967), 233.
503
Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: 436.
504
Burke, Grammar, XV-XXII, 3-20.
505
David Birdsell, “Ronald Reagan on Lebanon and Granada: Flexibility and Interpretation in the
Application of Kenneth Burke’s Pentad,” in Methods of rhetorical criticism: a twentieth-century
perspective, Eds. Brock, Scott, and Chesebro (Michigan: Wayne State Univ Press, 1980), 198.
506
David Ling, “A Pentadic Analysis of Senator Edward Kennedy’s Address to the People of
Massachusetts, July 25, 1969,” Central States Speech Journal 21 (1970): 81-86.
507
Birdsell, “Ronald Reagan,” 201.
508
Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the world, 1600-1850 (London: Anchor, 2004);
Pauline Strong, "Transforming Outsiders: Captivity, Adoption, and Slavery Reconsidered," in A
Companion to American Indian History, Eds. Deloria and Salisbury (Massachusetts and Oxford, U.K.:
Blackwell Publishers, 2002).
509
David Bromley,ed., The Politics of Religious Apostasy: The Role of Apostates in the
Transformation of Religious Movements (Westport, Connecticut and London: Praeger, 1998).
510
Carolyn Jessop, Escape (New York: Broadway, 2007); Steven Hassan, Combating Cult Mind
Control (South Maris, ME: Park Street Press, 1990).
511
Griffin in “the Rhetoric of Historical Movements” also emphasizes the importance of what he calls
“seceders” who are “recusants who, deserting the opposition, stand as potentially invaluable sources
of testimony.” Griffin, “The Rhetoric of Historical Movements.”
512
Stuart Wright, “Exploring Factors that Shape the Apostate Role,” in The Politics of Religious
Apostasy, ed. David Bromley (Westport, Connecticut and London: Praeger, 1998), 98.
513
Philip Jenkins and Daniel Maier-Katkin, “Occult Survivor, the Making of a Myth,” in The
Satanism Scare, ed. James Richardsen et al (New York: Aldine Transaction), 127-145. For survivor
memoirs see Jeanne M. Lorena and Paula Levy, eds., Breaking Ritual Silence: An Anthology of Ritual
Abuse Survivors’ Stories (Missouri: Trout and Sons, 1998); Judith Spencer, Satan’s High Priest (New
York: Simon and Shuster, 1997); Laura Buchanan, Satan’s Child, A Survivor Tells her Story to Help
Others Heal (Minnesota: CompCare Publishers, 1994).
514
Joseph Gusfield, Contested Meanings: The Construction of Alcohol Problems (University of
Wisconsin Press, 1996), 175. Peter Conrad, Deviance and Medicalization: from Badness to Sickness
(Temple University Press, 2000).
354

515
Mari Boor Tonn et al, “Hunting and Heritage on Trial.”
516
The Waco siege was conducted in the name of protecting children, so did the raid into a FLDS
ranch in April, 2008.
517
Bromley, “The Social Construction of Contested Exit Roles: Defectors, Whistle-blowers, and
Apostates;” in The Politics of Religious Apostasy, ed. David Bromley (Westport, Connecticut and
London: Praeger, 1998), 19-49. Shupe, “the Role of Apostates in the North America Anti-cult
Movement,” in the Politics of Religious Apostasy, ed. David Bromley (Westport, Connecticut and
London: Praeger, 1998), 209-19. David Bromley and Gordon Melton, eds. Cults, Religion and
Violence (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
518
Wright, “Factors,” 97.
519
Ethan Gutmann, “A Communist Myth: An Occurrence on Fuyou Street,” National Review, July 20,
2009.
520
"First anniversary of Falun Gong self-immolation," AFP, January 23, 2002.
521
Ethan Gutmann, Losing the New China.
522
Johnson, Wild Grass, 192- 218.
523
Ownby, Falun Gong and the Future of China.
524
Tong, Revenge, 196-203.
525
Philip P. Pan “Human Fire Ignites Chinese Mystery,” Washington Post, February 4, 2001.
526
Schechter, Falun Gong’s Challenge.
527
Ibid.
528
Ibid.
529
Ian Johnson, Wild Grass, 233-37.
530
Ian Jonson, Wild Grass, 196.
531
Jiang, “Letter.”
532
Johnson, Wild Grass, 200.
533
Some critics of the footage suspect Wang was sitting in standard PLA army man position, which
cast doubt on his identity.
534
Focus, “Falun Gong’s Self-Immolation,” CCTV, Feb 28, 2001.
535
Danny Schechter, “The Fires This Time: Immolation or Deception In Beijing?”
536
Wright, “Factors,”100.
537
Quoted in Ann Noonan, “Beijing is Burning. More lies from the PRC.”
538
Wright Bryan, “Self-Immolation: A Singular Form Of Protest Grabs Attention Again” NPR, Jan
08, 2011.
539
Michelle Young, “Still Burning.”
540
"The Tragedy of Falun Gong Practitioners- Rescue: Doctors, Nurses Rush to Save Life," Xinhua,
January 31, 2001.
541
Ibid.
542
Ibid.
543
Ibid.
544
“Wang Jindong De Zifen Licheng” (Wang Jindong’s Path to Self-Immolation), Kaifeng Net, Jan
22, 2007, http://www.kaiwind.com/redian/123zfa/kfbd/200801/t76574.htm.
545
Wang Jindong, “Wo Zai Tiananmen Guangchang Zifen Shijian De Qianho” (Recollections of
Things before and after my Self-Immolation at Tiannamen Square), Xinhua, April 7, 2003,
http://news.xinhuanet.com/newscenter/2003-04/07/content_819982.
546
Scholars have noted that radicalization of alternative religions (in the instance of Waco and
People’s Temple in particular) tend to take place when desperate NRM members interpret the state’s
besiegement of the group as a sign of the impending apocalypse. Mary Zeiss Stange, “U.S. ignores
religion's fringes,” USA Today, Oct 4, 2001.
547
Sallie King, "They Who Burned Themselves for Peace: Quaker and Buddhist Self-Immolators
during the Vietnam War," Buddhist-Crhistian Studies 20 (2000): 127-150.
548
“Falun Gong’s Self-Immolation,” Focus, CCTV, Feb 28, 2001.
549
Mr. Li (government official) in discussion with the author, Dec 2008.
355

550
Forney, “The Breaking point.”
551
“Falun Gong Cult: Heinous Crimes against Young Girls,” Xinhua, Feb 13, 2001.
552
Karin Andriolo, “Murder by Suicide: Episodes from Muslim History,” American Anthropologist
New Series (104)3:736-742.
553
Biggs, “Dying Alone.”
554
Jan Yun Hua, “Buddhist Self-Immolation in Medieval China,” History of Religions (4) no.2:
243-268.
555
Mathew Forney, “Breaking Point.”
556
“Falun Gong Chimi Zhe Wang Jindong Qizi He Nuer Zhuanhua Jishi” (Documenting the Existing
of Wang’s Wife and Daughter from the Cult), Xinhua, March 28, 2001.
557
“Rescue: Doctors and Nurses Rush to Save Life,” Xinhua News, Jan 31, 2001.
558
Mr. Li (government official) in discussion with the author, Dec, 2008.
559
Malcolm Browne. Muddy Boots and Red Socks: A Reporter’s Life (New York: Random House:
1993), 38.
560
David Halberstam, The Making of a Quagmire (New York: Random House, 1965).
561
Jan Yun Hua, “Medieval Monks.”
562
“Suicidal Blaze, Another Crime of Falun Gong,” Xinhua, Jan 31, 2001.
563
A post-self-immolation picture of the 19-year-old Chen Guo is available at
http://jpkc.gxun.edu.cn/kj-sxgl/03jiegougongneng/46%E5%8F%97%E5%AE%B3%E4%BA%BA%E
9%99%88%E6%9E%9C%E8%87%AA%E7%84%9A%E5%90%8E.jpg; pictures of the 12-year-old
are available at http://news.sina.com.cn/c/1-1-175943_falun12.jpg.
564
Wright, “Factors,” 98.
565
Wang Wen and Mu Zu, “Falun Gong Rang Tamen Zoushang Juelu” (Falun Gong Put Them On
the Road of No Return), Aug1, 2001, http://www.bjreview.cn/Cn/China/China2001-8-1.htm.
566
Pan, “One Way Trip to the End of Beijing.”
567
Wright, “Factor,” 98; Joan Ross and Michael Langone, Cults: What Parents Should Know: A
Practical Guide to Help Parents With Children in Destructive Groups (Weston: Massachusetts:
American Family Foundation, 1988).
568
Cui Li, “Dajie, Qingren Panni Cong Emeng Zhong Xinglai –Xiege Hao Huijun De Yifeng Xin”
(Big Sister, Your Family Hopes You Can Wake from the Nightmare – A Letter to Hao Huijun from her
Sister), Feb 11, 2002, http://www.cnfxj.org/bbs/thread-411-1-1.html.
569
Ibid.
570
Ibid.
571
“Cainv Heyi Zihui? Chenguo Chengwei Falun Gong Xunzang Ping,” (Why would a Talented Girl
End in Self-destruction? Chen Guo as Falun Gong’s Sacrifice), PLA Daily, Feb 7.
572
Wright, “Factor,” 98.
573
“Suicidal Blaze, another Crime of Falun Gong,” Xinhua, Jan 31, 2001.
574
Ibid.
575
Hassan, Combating; Joan Ross and Michael Langone, Cults.
576
Wright, “Factors,” 103.
577
“Families of Falun Gong Victims after Tragedy (1),” China Central Television, Feb 01, 2001.
578
“Zai Enshi Yu Muqing Zhijian” (Between Mentor and Mother), Qingdao Daily, Feb 8, 2001,
http://www.qingdaonews.com/content/2001-02/08/content_64556.htm.
579
Ibid.
580
Ibid.
581
“Tiananmen Zifen Zhe Wang Jindong De Zhuanhua Guocheng: Yumei Siwang He Xinsheng”
(Self-Immolator Wang Jindong’s Deprogramming: from stupidity and death to new life), Xinhua,
May 19, 2002.
582
“Wang Jindong De Zifen Licheng” (Wang Jindong’s Path to Self-Immolation).
583
Ibid.
584
Ibid.
585
“Falun Gong Chimi Zhe Wang Jindong Qizi He Nuer Zhuanhua Jishi” (Documenting the Existing
356

of Wang’s Wife and Daughter from the Cult).
586
“Wang Jindong De Zifen Licheng” (Wang Jindong’s Path to Self-Immolation).
587
Ibid.
588
“For the Peace of Tiananmen,” CCTV, Feb 16, 2001,
www.cctv.com/news/special/zt1/XieJiaoFaLunGong/3204.html.
589
“Suicidal Blaze, another Crime of Falun Gong Cult,” Xinhua News Agency, Jan 30, 2001.
590
Ibid.
591
John Gittings, “Chinese whispers surround Falun Gong trial,” Guardian, Aug 21, 2001.
592
Ibid.
593
"First anniversary of Falun Gong self-immolation,” AFP, January 23, 2002.
594
Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Former Falun Gong Followers Enlisted in China’s War on Sect,” New York
Times, April 05, 2002.
595
“Suicidal Blaze, another Crime of Falun Gong.”
596
David Bromley, the Politics of Religion Apostasy, 87.
597
“Tiananmen Zifen Shi Zhounian: Xinhua Zhuanfang Falun Gong Shouhai Zhe” (On the Tenth
Anniversary of Tiananmen Self-Immolation: A Special Report on the Falun Gong Victims), Xinhua
News Agency, Jan 23, 2011.
598
Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Former Falun Gong Followers Enlisted in China’s War on Sect.”
599
“For the Peace of Tiananmen.”
600
Anson Shupe, “The Role of Apostate in North America Anti-Cult movement,” 210
601
“Tiananmen Zifen Shi Zhounian: Xinhua Zhuanfang Falun Gong Shouhai Zhe” (On the Tenth
Anniversary).
602
Talcott Parsons, The Social System (New York: Macmillan, 1964).
603
“Tiananmen Zifen Shi Zhounian: Xinhua Zhuanfang Falun Gong Shouhai Zhe” (On the Tenth
Anniversary).
604
“Tiananmen Zifen Zhe Wang Jindong: Li Hongzhi Ni Shige Da Pianzi” (Self-Immolator Wang
Jindong: Li Hongzhi You are a Liar), Xinhua News Agency, May 19, 2002.
605
Wright, “The Apostate Role and Career”, 101-102.
606
Birdsell, “Reagan,” 198.
607
Mr. Zhao (social scientist) in discussion with the author, Dec 2010.
608
“Rescue: Doctors, Nurses Rush to Save Life.”
609
“For the Peace of Tiananmen.”
610
“A Letter to Hao Huijun from her Younger Sister,” PLA Daily, Feb 25, 2001.
611
“For the Peace of Tiananmen.”
612
“Tiananmen Tense after Fiery Protests,” CNN, Jan 24, 2001.
613
“Falun Gong Chimi Zhe Wang Jindong Qizi He Nuer Zhuanhua Jishi” (Documenting the
Existing).
614
“Tiananmen Zifen Zhe Wang Jindong De Zhuanhua Guocheng: Yumei Siwang He Xinsheng.”
615
Ibid.
616
Pan, “One Way Trip to the End in Beijing.”
617
NTDTV, False Fire.

Chapter 7

618
Burke defines dramatism as follows: “A method of analysis and a corresponding critique of
terminology designed to show that the most direct route to the study of human relations and human
motives is via a methodical inquiry into cycles or clusters of terms and their functions.” Kenneth
Burke, "Dramatism." International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1968), 445,
619
Michael Overington, "Kenneth Burke and the Method of Dramatism" Theory and Society 4 (1977):
131-156.
620
Robert Cathcart defines rhetoric movements as “dialectic enjoinment in the moral arena” and it is
this “reciprocity” that “defines movements and distinguishes them from other dramatistic forms.”
357

Cathcart, “New Approaches,” 87.
621
Aristotle, Topics I, VIII, and Selections, trans. Robin Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
622
Virginia Holland, “Rhetorical Criticism: A Burkeian Method,” Quarterly Journal of Speech
39(1953): 444-450
623
Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1941), 20.
624
Michael Leff, “Topical Invention and Metaphoric Interaction,” 220.
625
Kenneth Burke, "Dramatism." International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York,
1968), 445.
626
Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 101.
627
Ouyang Fei, “Seeing Through ‘The Chinese Communist Party Culture’: Return to Normal
Thinking,” PureInsight, Oct 2005, http://www.pureinsight.org/node/3691.
628
Thomas Jefferson, “Jefferson's Letter to the Danbury Baptists,” Jan. 1 1802, Library of Congress
Information Bulletin 57 no.6, http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danpre.html.
629
Kenneth Burke, "Dramatism." International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York,
1968), 445.
630
The concept of “rhetorical practice” is not new. See for instance Kevin DeLuca, ‘‘Articulation
Theory: A Discursive Grounding for Rhetorical Practice,’’Philosophy and Rhetoric 32 (1999): 334 -
48; Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009); Elizabeth Fleitz, ‘‘Cooking Codes: Cookbook
Discourses as Women’s Rhetorical Practices,’’
Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society 1, 1 (2010): 1-8. Although “practice” affords the
impression that it tackles the mundane and perfomative aspect of rhetorical transactions, some
scholars contend that practice involves discursive components, too. For instance, Senda-Cook
suggests that “Practices collapse materiality and discourse.” Samantha Senda-Cook, “Rugged
Practices: Embodying Authenticity in Outdoor Recreation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no.2
(2012): 129-152.
631
Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron,” in Readings on the Rhetoric of
Social Protest, ed. Charles Morris III and Stephen Browne (State College, Pennsylvania: Strata
Publishing, Inc, 2001), 207.
632
Richard Gregg, “The ego-function of the rhetoric of protest,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 4, 71-91.
633
Leland Griffin, “The Rhetoric of Historical Movement.”
634
Maurice Natanson, “The Claims of Immediacy,” Philosophy, Rhetoric and Argumentation, ed.
Maurice Natason and Henry Johnstone, Jr. (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1965),
15.
635
Alan Touraine, Solidarity: The analysis of a social movement: Poland 1980-81, Trans. D. Denby
( London: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 150.
636
John Hannigan, “Social Movement Theory and the Sociology of Religion: Toward a New
Synthesis,” Sociological Analysis 52 no. 4: 311-333.
637
Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato write that “The dual logic of feminist politics thus involves a
communicative discursive politics of identity and influence that targets civil and political society and
an organized, strategically rational politics of inclusion and reform that is aimed at political and
economic institutions. Indeed almost all major analyses of the feminist movement (in the United
States and Europe) have shown the existence and importance of dualistic politics.” Jean Cohen and
Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 560.
638
Karlyn Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron;” Gordon Mitchell,
“Public Argument Action Research and the Learning Curve of New Social Movements”
Argumentation and Advocacy 40 (Spring 2004): 209-225.
639
Ibid.
640
Gordon R. Mitchell, “ Public Argument Action Research and the Learning Curve of New Social
Movements,”
Argumentation and Advocacy 40: 209-225.
641
Robert Cathcart, “New approaches to the study of movements: Defining movements rhetorically,”
358

Western Journal of Communication 36 no. 2: 82 — 88.
642
G. Thomas Goodnight, “Controversy,” in Argument in controversy: Proceedings of the seventh
SCA/AFA conference on argumentation, ed. Donn Parson, Annandale, VA: Speech Communication
Association, 1991: 1-13.
643
James Klumpp and Thomas Hollihan, “Rhetorical criticism as moral action,” Quarterly Journal of
Speech 78: 450-465.
644
While researching for this dissertation, I have encountered a number of the so-called
“pro-democracy dissidents” from the Tiananmen movement era who show respect and admiration for
the stamina and perseverance Falun Gong has displayed in standing its ground. An online blog by Cao
Yan, an activist/blogger, confirms this sentiment. He writes that “It is a proven fact that the
Communist Party would only give in to those who have been building their own power and strength –
Falun Gong is such a great example” (my translation). Cao An, “Falun Gong,” Oct 2005,
http://www.duping.net/XHC/show.php?bbs=11&post=754606.
645
On many a occasion Li Hongzhi suggests that cosmic lives undergo the same process of
metabolism: “ [T]he historical process of the greater cosmos…, the process of the countless planes of
lives within it, …resembles the metabolic process in the sense that it is a continual process of
replacement… as part of the process of formation, stasis, (and) degeneration.” Li Hongzhi, “What is a
Dafa Disciple” (Speech given at the 2011 New York Fa Conference, New York, August 29, 2011).
646
The original quote is: “The Community Party is an evil cult possessed by an evil spectre – a
demonic force that manifest in this world through the Party’s organizations.” The Epochtimes, 9
Commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party, May 2004,
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/c/china-news/nine-commentaries-china-news/.
647
See for instance an online blogger Zhang Jie Lian’s article “With a Fight, Australia Broke Free
from the Giant Whore.” The article depicts how the Australian government was once dangerously
close to losing its soul to the “whore” in colluding with Beijing to suppress Falun Gong in Australia.
Zhang Jie Lian, “Auzhou Zai Tongku Zhong Zhengtuo Da Yinfu” (With a Flight, Australia Broke
Free from the Giant Whore), June 11, 2005.
http://yuming.flnet.org/NEWS/wenhua_16/2005-06/1118489403.html;
648
Li Hongzhi, “After Havoc,” Jan 2, 1996,
http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/hongyin/v2/hy_40.htm.
649
“Heavenly signs” are to be understood in terms of the “moral universe” theory which holds that
the universe is sentient and responsive to humanly actions. The notion of “moral universe” is derived
from the ancient classic Yi Ching which views “heaven, earth, and man” as three mutually constitutive
forces. Zhengjian (Pure Insight), one website run by Falun Gong practitioners, sets up a special
column titled “Between heaven, earth and man,” devoted to collecting “omens and signs.” See
www.zhengjian.org.
650
About the “reward” awaiting Falun Gong disciples, Li instructs: “So for Dafa disciples, no matter
how harsh this period of history that we're going through is, there's nothing to grieve over…what
awaits a Dafa disciple is the most wonderful.” Li, “Teaching the Fa at the 2003 Washington DC Fa
Conference,” July 20, 2003, http://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2003/7/30/38684.html. Missionary
work has been made a priority in recent years. Most of Li’s lectures after 2003 would emphasize the
urgency of “saving sentient beings: “At present, the most important thing is to save sentient beings,
save more people! That is the most important thing.” It is just that Dafa disciples have a duty to save
sentient beings, so they are concerned for sentient beings…. In reality, your responsibilities as Dafa
disciples all lie right there. If you don't take action to save sentient beings, you will not have fulfilled
your responsibility as a Dafa disciple and your cultivation will amount to nothing, for your becoming
a Dafa disciple was not for the sake of your own Consummation. This means that you shoulder a
monumental mission.” Li Hongzhi, “Fa Teaching at the 2009 Washington DC International Fa
Conference,” July 18, 2009, http://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2009/7/26/109522.html, and “Fa
Teaching at the 2007 New York Fa Conference,” April 7, 2007.
http://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2007/4/22/84823.html.
651
Stephen O’Leary, Arguing Apocalypse, 213. He defines apocalypse as providing a symbolic
359

“solution to the theodicy problem as a particular construction of temporality.”
652
In Attitude toward History, Kenneth Burke argues that social interaction and conflict can be
mapped onto their literary parallels such as elegy, comedy, tragedy, burlesque, irony, etc. Those
literary forms offer agents frames of reference in action, and help critics discover the motives of a
movement. Choosing a “productive” or “destructive” “form” (Burke’s favorite being “comedy”) has a
profound impact on how human society might fare. Burke’s theorizing on form has captured the
attention of scholars seeking to shed light on various communication phenomena. For instance,
Stephen O’Leary applies comedy and tragedy to classify apocalyptic discourse which he sees is
comprised of three quintessential topoi, i.e. time, evil and authority. The tragic view conceives of evil
as “guilt,” proposes the resolution of “victimage,” and projects time as inexorably building toward the
final calamity; human actions and choices are pre-determined as if in a “fate.” By contrast, a comic
frame accepts evil as “error” which can be corrected through recognition and awareness; it presents
future as “fortune,” its outcome “open” and “unfolding;” instead of forecasting an absolute closure of
time, the comic vision imagines time as episodic, dotted by chapters of disruption and recovery of
equilibrium. Indentifying comic and tragic frame of reference in apocalyptic arguments helps
explicate the rhetorical power of and the rhetorical burden foisted upon the “end of days” predictions
(if the projected closure fails to pan out, which happened a few times in history); it also indicates ways
to wriggle out of such a predicament. My goal in adopting “form” as a theoretical lens onto the Falun
Gong apocalypse stems from a similar concern to Burk’s: I want to query, through examining the
constructs of time and evil, the movement’s motive, its attitude toward the system it has locked horns
with, and the impact it has on society at large. To be more specific, I would like to mire the
movement’s implication as a civil religion through examining its apocalyptic visions. Kenneth Burke,
Attitudes toward History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); O’Leary, Arguing the
Apocalypse.
653
Stephen O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse, 178.
654
Ruth Bloch, Visionary republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800 (Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 12.
655
Stephen O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse, 38.
656
A. Cheree Carlson, “Gandhi and the Comic Frame: ‘Ad Bellum Purificandum,’” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 72 no.4 (1986): 446-455.
657
Kenneth Burke, Attitude in History, 57-8.
658
Throughout Li’s 2011 lecture in New York, we can find 18 “final”s: “the final phase of the
world,” “this final period,” “at this final, critical juncture in history,” “the cosmos has arrived at the
final stage of its cycle of formation, stasis, and degeneration.” etc. Li, “What is a Dafa Disciple?”
659
Duncan, Communication, 309.
660
Li Hongzhi, “Fa Teaching Given at the Epoch Times Meeting,” Oct 17, 2009,
http://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2009/11/15/112402.html.
661
This episode bears striking similarities to the classic Buddhist story of “Buddha defying mara.” In
the story, Mara the demon lord is not so much a person as a personification of the desires yet to be
fulfilled. He is known to be Varsavarti, meaning “the one who fulfills desires.” In this capacity, Mara
personifies the triple thirst, i.e. the thirst for existence, the thirst for pleasure, and the thirst for power
and their fulfillment -- he is the king purveyor of sensual delight.
662
Li Hongzhi,“Be Vigilant,” Aug 4, 2009, http://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2009/8/5/109792.html.
663
Li Honghzi, “Teaching the Fa at the Western U.S. International Fa Conference,” Feb 26, 2005,
http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/lectures/20050226L.html.
664
Li Hongzhi, “Touring North America to Teach the Fa,” March 2002,
http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/lectures/200203L.html.
665
Li Hongzhi, “Each Must Choose Between Good and Evil,” April 6, 2006,
http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/hy3_034.htm.
666
Stephen O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse, 68.
667
The Epochtimes, “Commentary 2: On the Beginnings of the Chinese Communist Party,” May
2004,
360

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-news/commentary-2-on-the-beginnings-of-the-chinese-com
munist-party-228247.html.
668
Li Hongzhi, “Explaining the Fa During the 2003 Lantern Festival at the U.S. West Fa
Conference,” Feb 15, 2003, http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/lectures/20030215L_2.html.
669
Li Hongzhi, “Fa Rectifies the Cosmos,” April 6, 2002,
http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/HongYinIIVA.htm#_Toc141367555.
670
Li Hongzhi, “What is a Dafa Disciple,” Aug 29, 2011,
http://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2011/9/15/128106.html.
671
Ibid.
672
“Selected Tuidang Statements, Sept. 5–6,” September 13, 2012,
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-news/selected-tuidang-statements-sept-5-6-292113.html.
673
Jamil Anderlini ,“Rmb: Falun Gong’s new voice,” July 22, 2011, Financial Times,
http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2011/07/22/falun-gong-uses-rmb-to-spread-the-word/#axzz1p6UaYK
5E.
674
“People in Mainland China For Whom it Would be Dangerous to Publicize Their Names Can
Publicly Announce Their Withdrawal from the CCP Using an Alias,” Feb 22, 2005,
http://en.minghui.org/emh/articles/2005/2/22/57791p.html.
675
Ibid.
676
Ethan Gutmann, “The Chinese Internet: A dream deferred?” (Testimony given at the National
Endowment for Democracy, Washington DC, 2 June 2009).
677
Li Hongzhi, “Teaching the Fa at the Western U.S. International Fa Conference,”
http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/lectures/20050226L.html.
678
Minghui Editors, “People in Mainland China For Whom it Would be Dangerous to Publicize Their
Names Can Publicly Announce Their Withdrawal from the CCP Using an Alias,” Minghui, Feb 22,
2005, http://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2005/2/22/57791.html.
679
Caylan Ford, “An underground challenge to China's status quo,” The Christian Science Monitor,
Oct 21, 2009, http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2009/1021/p09s01-coop.html.
680
“Quitting the CCP,” http://www.theepochtimes.com/211,95,,1.html.
681681
Caylan Ford, “An underground challenge to China's status quo.”
682
Ching Cheong , “China Prepares for 'War Without Gun Smoke,' “ Straits Times Indonesia, April 16,
2011, http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/opinion/china-prepares-for-war-without-gun-smoke/435812.
“Tuidang,” or “Party-withdrawing,” is also one of the most severely censored terms by China’s
Internet censors. See Derek E. Bambauer et al, “Internet Filtering in China in 2004-2005: A Country
Study,” April 14, 2005, http://opennet.net/sites/opennet.net/files/ONI_China_Country_Study.pdf.
683
Li Hongzhi, “Teaching the Fa at the 2005 Manhattan International Fa Conference,” April 24, 2005,
http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/lectures/20050424L.html; Matthew Robertson, “The Tuidang
Movement: 100 Million Chinese Hearts Changed: Movement to renounce the Chinese Communist
Party reaches major milestone,” the Epochtimes, August 10, 2011,
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-news/the-tuidang-movement-100-million-chinese-hearts-cha
nged-60195.html?links.
684
Caylan Ford, “An underground challenge to China's status quo.”
685
Both “Potius Convincere Quam Conviciari” and “Ad Bellum Purificandum” are inscriptions on
Kenneth Burke’s window frame. “Potius Convincere Quam Conviciari” can be translated to “rather to
prove or demonstrate than to revile or reproach.”
686
As James Gruber succinctly summarizes, “Over the past three decades, China’s Communist Party
has had a pact with its people: you give us one-party rule and we’ll give allow you to get on with you
lives and make money.” James Gurber, “Will China Ditch Mao To Save The Party?” Asia
Confidential, November 10, 2012 , http://asiaconf.com/2012/11/10/will-china-ditch-mao/.

361

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract The dissertation traces the early development of Falun Gong through three moments (legitimation, crisis, and the climax of the dispute) and the activities of four topoi (health, family, politics and religion). Adopting topic analysis and dramatism, I argue that each moment is defined by a unique topic formation as rhetors select and motivate topoi to address the situational needs. The first moment is defined by the topos of ""health"" which embodies and subsumes political imperatives and religious differences. The second moment—when ""heath"" is no longer able to encompass the conflict—is characterized by intense disputes along the religio-political and domestic polity line. The third moment releases a ""cult"" story which is realized through the so-called ""self-immolation"" incident: All four topoi are in motion, with ""political significance"" of the incident emptied out, and all that is left is a story of ""brainwashed cultists committing crimes against health and family."" I argue that tracing the movement's early developmental arc through four topoi helps preserve a piece of history, offers a glimpse into the unique political culture in which the movement is grounded, permits us to appreciate non-conventional social action paradigms, and compels rhetorical analysis to expand to encompass atypical expression and communication.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Zhou, Mei (author)

Core Title Falun Gong’s evolving definitions through stages and disputes

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 12/10/2016

Defense Date 06/19/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag alternative religion,China,China politics,dramatism,embodied movement,Falun Gong,health movement,OAI-PMH Harvest,social movement rhetoric,topic analysis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Goodnight, Gerald Thomas (committee chair), Miller, Donald Earl (committee member), O'Leary, Stephen D. (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-357699

Unique identifier UC11296639

Identifier etd-ZhouMei-2216.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-357699 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-ZhouMei-2216.pdf

Dmrecord 357699

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Seid, Sam

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA